Chapter XIII The Last of the Silver Ring
“Past the pearl-gates, through the golden—
When we meet His face who died,
Each want full filled, new and olden,
We, too, shall be satisfied.”
King Edward quitted England on the twentieth of June, 1475, for a personal interview with the King of France. At this interview an agreement was entered into between the monarchs for the ransom of the royal widow who for four years had been pining out her life in English prisons. What moved that inscrutable mortal, King Louis, to lay down twenty thousand crowns in hard cash for the ransom of Marguerite, is one of those puzzles in psychology which must ever remain perplexities. It is true that her father, King René, was pressing him hard—as hard as it lay in his dreamy artist nature: and it is also true that Louis was urged—or at any rate professed to be so—by considerations of the outraged dignity of his own family, to which Marguerite belonged, through her continued imprisonment—a statement which might be true—and by feelings of compassion for a helpless woman—an assertion which hardly can be so. One of the last men to be moved by sentiments of pity, particularly towards a woman, was surely Louis XI.
King Edward was more consistent with himself. He took care to have the money in his pocket before he permitted Marguerite to escape his fingers. And, with that intense smallness of soul which—with the exception of King John—was most remarkable in him of all the Plantagenet monarchs, he refused, in his diplomatic negotiations, to bestow upon Marguerite the regal title. Judging from his diction, he was puzzled what to call her. He hit at last upon her title as a Neapolitan Princess, less than which it might seem impossible to give her. On the thirteenth of November, 1475, Thomas Thwaytes, knight, received the royal command to deliver “the most serene Lady Margaret, daughter of the illustrious Prince King René,” to Sir Thomas Montgomery; and the latter was ordered to convey the said lady to “the most serene Prince, Louis of France, our dearest cousin.” The ingenious way in which King Louis is very civilly described, without admitting his title to the crown of France, is worth notice. But when the actual delivery came, it was found that a lower indignity yet was possible for poor Marguerite. She was required to sign a formal renunciation of all rights and privileges in England which her marriage-settlements had secured to her. In this document no title whatever was given to her. She was not even recognised as a foreign Princess. The opening words described her as “Margaret, sometime in England married.” The words would have truly described every cottager’s wife in the kingdom who bore the name of Margaret—then one of the commonest names in England. But when the insulting document was laid down before the Queen, she calmly took up the pen and signed it. What did titles signify to her now? There was no husband, there was no son, whose rights could be invaded, and whose feelings could be outraged, by any renunciation of name or dignity on her part. She felt with Valentina of Orleans—“Rien ne m’ est plus: plus ne m’ est rien!” So she quietly signed her regal “Marguerite,”76 and by her own act laid down that queenly title which had been so heavy and blood-stained a burden.
Queen Marguerite survived this action six years, which she spent, so long as her father lived, with him at the Castle of Reculée, near Angers, and afterwards at Château Dampierre, near Saumur. Her last years were burdened with the horrible disease of leprosy,77 supposed to have been caused by intense grief. It was on the twenty-fifth of August, 1482, at Château Dampierre, that she laid down the weary weight of life, and as we would fain believe and surely may be allowed to hope, went to keep eternal holiday.
Perhaps, for her, there was no other way into the Garden of God than through that great and howling wilderness. If it were so, how glad a sight must the lights of home have been to that storm-wearied voyager!
This interview between the two Kings had a further pecuniary result—the payment during some time of an annual sum of £11,000 by France to England—a sum which the King of France was careful to term a pension, and which the King of England took equal care to call a tribute. Edward also made a further effort to obtain the young Earl of Richmond, who was the fly in his ointment: but that wary youth, learning the fact, took instant sanctuary, and the effort was in vain.
The winter of 1475-6 opened with rejoicings for the birth of the Princess Anne—perhaps the best of the daughters of Edward IV. She certainly possessed two qualities enjoyed by few of the others—lowliness and modesty. The rejoicings were increased a week after New Year’s Day, when a second royal Anne was born—the only child of the Duchess of Exeter and Sir Thomas St. Leger. She lived to become the stock of the Dukes of Rutland: and she transmitted to them, not only the property of her mother, but also lands on which she had no equitable claim—those of the hapless Duke of Exeter. Had there been any right feeling in the heart of his wretched widow, she would have bequeathed those estates to the last of the Holands of Exeter, his sister Anne, Lady Douglas, and they would have descended to her posterity, the Nevilles of Raby. She did it not: and she had little time to do it. The baby daughter had scarcely more than entered this troublesome world, ere the soul was required of the Princess Anne of Exeter. She died on the twelfth or fourteenth of January, 1476. For her an awful account waited at the judgment bar.
In the last month of that year, Isabel Duchess of Clarence was summoned before the same Divine tribunal. Her death was a signal misfortune to her husband. Her influence had not been altogether for good, by any means, yet such good as had been in it was sorely missed. Clarence had loved her, and it is doubtful if he ever loved any other creature. After her death he became reckless even beyond his former unscrupulous condition. Gloucester kept his sinister eyes upon him, ready to take advantage of the first political slip which he might make. It came two years after Isabel’s death. Clarence, who had previously quarrelled with his brother Edward, was present at a trial of some old women on the charge of witchcraft, and took the liberty of remonstrating with the judges on too much haste in condemning the prisoners, as it seemed to him, without sufficient evidence. Gloucester took advantage of this circumstance. He adroitly represented to the King that Clarence had interfered with the course of justice, thus taking upon himself a prerogative of the Crown: that there was strong reason to think that he contemplated a journey to Burgundy, with the view of assisting the Duke, then in hostility to King Edward: that he had many times tried to supplant his brother. The intensely superstitious Edward was reminded of an old prediction that “G. shall reign after E.,”—and did not George begin with the fated letter? So did Gloucester, but of course my Lord Duke omitted that suggestion. He succeeded in frightening Edward into a panic. Clarence was arrested, placed before the Council, and condemned unheard. He was sentenced to be hanged: but at the intercession of the Duchess Cicely, mother alike of the King and of the criminal, the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in the Tower. Ten days later, in his dungeon, Clarence was found dead, his head hanging over an open butt of his favourite liquor, malvoisie. Hence arose the popular tradition that he had been allowed to choose the manner of his death, and that he had elected to be drowned in a butt of malmsey. In all probability the open butt had been placed in his cell by order of the brother who so well knew Clarence’s weakness, and hoped by this means to get rid of him without any legal responsibility as to his end. So perished the false and faithless Clarence,—destroyed, like many another, on a mere technical pretext, when on other counts he had previously merited execution a hundred times over.
The years went on, and after a very short illness, Edward IV. passed to his own account. After him came the deluge. Events succeeded one another with startling rapidity. Only for two months was that grave and gentle boy styled King Edward V. Then came the sudden coup d’ etat, prepared for during many years, by which Gloucester seized the crown, and shut up the boy-King in prison. The Queen and Princesses once more fled to sanctuary; the old friends and adherents of Edward, some of whom had sold their very souls for the White Rose, were sacrificed on the most trifling pretexts: and among them, the best of them all, the upright and honourable Rivers. The boy-King and his brother were put quietly out of the way. The new King made a progress throughout the country, from Windsor to York, joined by the Queen at Warwick. One of those strange gleams of tenderness which now and then flit across the conduct of Richard III., as though for an instant he paused to listen to the whispers of his better angel, induced him to spare Anne Neville a royal progress which would have led her through Tewkesbury. At the close of the year King Richard was at Westminster, firmly seated on his blood-stained throne. He might well think, like the Spanish Regent, that he had not a single enemy: for he had shot them all. But he forgot one, yet left on earth: and he forgot one Other, who remaineth for ever in Heaven.
And then his Nemesis began to come upon him. His one cherished child died “an unhappy death” at Middleham Castle. His wife, once if selfishly, yet so passionately loved, faded away and died by inches, surviving her boy just twelve months. The terrors of God overwhelmed him. He was tormented by perpetual apprehensions of conspiracy, and distracted by nightly visions of horror. And then Richmond landed at Milford Haven, and the climax came. With that personal courage which was the best item of his bad character, Richard rushed into the field of Bosworth, “and, foremost fighting, fell.”
So ended the male line of the White Rose. The Red was uppermost at last. The struggle, with all its untold agony, which had lasted through thirty years, was over at length, and for ever.
Some tardy justice was done now. To the poor old Countess of Warwick, starving in the north, her lands were given back, the iniquitous decree which had deprived her of them being stigmatised, as it deserved, as “against all reason, conscience, and course of nature, and contrary to the law of God and man.” But not only the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, but also all covetous desires of the same, had long ago faded from that lonely and weary heart. All whom she had loved were in the grave, and her heirs were grandchildren whom she had never known, whose father had been her worst enemy, and who were abundantly provided for without a rood of any land of hers. Just a few pounds while she lived, just a shelter to cover her hoary head, was all that Anne Beauchamp craved for the little rest of life. She resigned all her property the same year to the Crown, receiving in exchange the manor of Sutton, in Warwickshire. It was probably there that she died, full of years and sorrows, in or shortly before 1493.
To “Dame Bessy Grey” the Nemesis came too. It is customary to bestow great pity on the widow of Edward IV.; and it is true that few women have known more crushing sorrow than she. But I think it is too commonly forgotten how much she had deserved it. She was a most designing woman—the truth was not in her: and she was pitiless to the sorrows of others. In her last years she retired to Bermondsey Convent—of her own motion; not, as has been represented, through coercion from her son-in-law—and there she died, on the 7th or 8th of June, 1493.
Except in the form of witnessing sorrows borne by his friends, no Nemesis ever came to Thomas Grey, now78 Marquis of Dorset. That form is, to some natures, one of the very bitterest which pain can take: to others it is absolutely painless. Judging from what is known of his character, it may be surmised that the misfortunes of his friends would be a sorrow borne very philosophically by him. Two years’ exile, during the short reign of King Richard, was the worst he had to bear for himself—that is, in this life.
Notwithstanding his disappointment concerning Agnes, Master Rotherham kept up his acquaintance with Lovell Tower. He was present when she took the veil at Godstow, in the summer of 1476; and that she was not the only attraction he found in the family was proved by the continuance of his visits. About three years after her profession, Master Rotherham came to the conclusion, which he communicated to Lord Marnell, that his grief for the loss of Agnes would be considerably alleviated if he might have her sister Dorathie. Lord Marnell hesitated: for Dorathie’s social position, as heiress presumptive to her mother’s barony, was very different from that of Agnes. But he consulted the elder ladies, and found Lady Margery of opinion that a good, sensible man without title or large property would be a much better husband for Dorathie than a bad or foolish man who brought her a coronet and a county.
“Say you not so, Madam?” she concluded, turning to her mother.
The Lady Idonia’s reply was to call Dorathie to her. She took her grand-daughter’s face in both hands, and looked tenderly at the rosy cheeks and the pretty blue eyes, which were those neither of father nor mother, but which reminded Idonia Marnell, how often no one knew, of other blue eyes which were dust now in the Abbey of St. Albans.
“Aye, Madge. It will do,” was the short but distinct decision of the old lady.
So Dorathie Marston became Dorathie Rotherham, and instead of departing to some strange place with her husband, he came to live with her.
The years went on, until the autumn leaves of 1537 were carpeting the green sward, and the wind was blowing keenly through the glades of Woodstock, and waving the willows that congregate round the Abbey of Godstow. The period was one which we look back upon as lively and tumultuous: yet to the few aged men and women who could look back further yet, to the terrible days of the Roses, it seemed very quiet. Matters had changed greatly since that time. The little printing-press set up by William Caxton the mercer in the Westminster Cloisters, had spread its wide wings over all the land: and the monk who, in his isolated courage, had posted his theses on the door of the church at Wittemburg, had spread his skirts over all the world. Men talked busily now on subjects which they had hardly thought about, fifty years before. Men, aye, and women too, dared to think for themselves. And one of the earliest results of these phenomena was the conclusion that the so-called religious houses had generally ceased to be houses of religion, and that the sooner they were done away with the better.
The state of many of these religious houses was of a kind that simply cannot be described. In them Satan and his angels reigned supreme. But there were a few—alas! they were very few—where the vows were really kept, where learning still had scope, and charity still held sway. And of female communities, the best of all these was the Abbey of Godstow.
The smaller houses, of the value of three hundred marks and under, were first suppressed. The larger, of which Godstow was one, followed later. Undoubtedly the motives for this proceeding were not pure and unmixed. Every person who joined in it was not actuated by exclusive regard for morality, nor was everybody quite innocent of some respect for those confiscated lands—not to speak of silver vases, gemmed reliquaries, and gold pieces—which, in the general up-breaking, might fall in his direction. Perhaps, when we have satisfied ourselves that our own motives are on all occasions absolutely unadulterated, we shall be in a more advantageous position to cast stones at the Reformers.
The suppression of the Abbey of Godstow was close at hand, and the nuns had made arrangements for the lives they meant to lead in future. Such of them as had relatives living commonly returned to them. A few of the elder ones, who had none, took refuge in the one or two convents of their Order which were, reasonably and charitably, allowed to remain until the death of the last surviving member. Those who married were very few, and were decidedly independent of public opinion.
On a small, but comfortable, pallet-bed in the infirmary of the Abbey lay one nun who needed to make no such provision for future life. She had received her invitation to the King’s Palace, and she lay waiting for His messengers to bring His chariot for her. She had other invitations too: loving entreaties from the distant wolds of Yorkshire, where Dorathie Rotherham, Baroness Marnell of Lymington, herself an old woman of eighty years, was longing to cheer the last days of her aged and only sister; and scarcely less urgent pressure from far Devonshire, where the Lady Combe, of Combe Abbas, was affectionately desirous to minister to her husband’s saintly and venerable aunt. But none of all these moved Mother Agnes, as she lay in the pallet-bed, waiting for the King’s messengers. Life’s fitful fever was over, and the eventide had come. For her there was a longer journey, to a better home.
Outside the infirmary two nuns, an old woman and a middle-aged one, were discussing some point which evidently disturbed their serenity.
“Well, it must be, I count,” said the younger, who was the Abbess herself. “I am sore afeared it shall be diseaseful to Mother Agnes. Good lack, can they not do the King’s gracious pleasure without poking into every corner, and counting the threads in every spider’s web! Howbeit—Well! go, Sister Katherine, and say that my Lords the King’s Commissioners can ascend now. But I would have thee say to the chief of them, whoso it be, that in the infirmary is a very aged and holy sister that is nigh to death, and that I pray them of their grace to tread in that chamber as quiet as may be.”
Sister Katherine departed on her errand, and the Abbess went forward into the sick chamber. A few minutes later her messenger rejoined her.
“My Lords Commissioners speak very fair,” said she. “I told the eldest gentleman as you bade me, holy Mother: and he promiseth that only the three chiefest of them shall come into this chamber, and that they shall tread and speak so quiet as may be.”
“’Tis the best we may look for,” responded the Abbess: “but I would it were well over.”
In about half an hour the footsteps were heard approaching. They roused the dying nun, who had been in a dozing condition for some time.
“What is it, holy Mother?” she said nervously.
“Dear heart, ’tis but those weary companions, the King’s Highness’ noble Commissioners, that must needs see with their own evil eyes how many candlesticks and phials of physic be of the mantel-shelf,” said the Abbess rather irritably. “They know their own business, trow: but verily I would have thought, after reckoning every aglet79 in the treasury, and every stick of firewood in the yard, they might have left us poor nuns be to drink our senna in peace. Dear heart, what work is here to drive out an handful of old women into this wicked world! Well, well! we shall soon have done therewith, most of us.”
She ceased her diatribe, for my Lords Commissioners were entering, and standing up, gave them her blessing—with how much sincerity she was not careful to state. The three gentlemen bowed low to the mitred Abbess, and seemed half alarmed at their own temerity.
“Methinks we need not tarry hither,” said the chief Commissioner. “May-be, holy Sister”—addressing Sister Katherine—“it should stand with your conveniency, under leave of my Lady Abbess, to take note of such furnishings as be in this chamber, and we will accept the same.—Lead forth, my Lord of Dorset.”
Before this could be done, the further progress of the Commissioners was intercepted by a weak voice from the pallet bed.
“My Lord of Dorset!” said Mother Agnes faintly.
The youngest of the party, a fair-haired, good-looking young man of about five-and-twenty, paused and turned to her, as if the name belonged to him.
“Pray you, of your grace, come one moment hither,” she said, speaking with some difficulty.
The young Marquis came forward at once, and knelt by the bed of the dying nun, who looked earnestly for some seconds into his face.
“What kin are you,” she asked, “to sometime Queen Elizabeth, whose son was Lord of Dorset?”
“That son was my father’s father,” answered the young man.
“So long ago!” said the dying woman. “Young Lord, ’tis but like yesterday that your father’s father was a young man like you. ‘Past, as a watch in the night!’”
Her eyes ran feebly over the handsome features, the clear grey eyes, the nervous twitching of the brow, the good-natured fulness of the lower lip, the weak, vacillating indecision of the retreating chin. In those few seconds, she seemed to read his character.
“The good Lord’s grace be with thee!” said the faint voice at last. “Be thou strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might!”
Did Henry Grey think of those words, twenty years later, when after a life spent in bondage through fear of death, God gave him grace to break through the trammels of Satan, and to stand bravely out upon Tower Hill to die for Him?
The Commissioners were gone, to the relief of the Abbess, who muttered something as the door closed after them, which was not the same form of words as the benediction with which she had greeted them. The next moment she bent down to listen to the weak tones of Mother Agnes.
“Holy Mother, may I crave a boon of you?”
“Surely, good my sister,” said the testy yet kind-hearted Abbess.
“Mother, among the gear that came hither with me, must be in the treasury “—
Agnes paused for breath.
“Well, good sister?”
“A silver ring, set with little rubies in form of a cresset.”
“Aye. What so?”
“Good Mother, of your grace, give me leave to bear that ring upon my finger until I go hence.”
The Abbess was sorely exercised by this request. It must imply either strong vanity in the dying nun, or else a most undue attachment to earthly things. Nay, probably, it meant what was still worse—an attachment to earthly persons: a most improper thing in a professed nun! The Abbess hesitated, but the woman’s heart in her prevailed, as she looked into the wistful, dying eyes.
“My sister, shall I do well if I say aye? Thou wist no holy nun must have affinity with the world. Who gave thee the ring?”
“One that hath been dust these sixty years.”
“Well, well! be it so. I trust thee, Sister Agnes. Only remember, thy thoughts should be above, not below.”
“Below is the dust only,” said Agnes. “What I loved is above.”
The old nun who kept the keys of the treasury found the silver ring, and brought it to the Abbess. A faint smile greeted the remembered token as it was slipped on the thin hand.
“Remove it not, I pray,” she said, “until I am not here to care for it. And now suffer me to keep silence, for I would commune with God.”
The hand that bore the ring was laid upon her breast, with the other hand crossed over it. Two hours passed, and she never stirred.
“She must lack food now,” whispered the Abbess to Sister Katherine.
Sister Katherine shook her more experienced head.
“She will eat no more, save of the angels’ manna.”
That night, Sister Margaret unlocked the treasury, and restored the ruby ring to its place. Agnes Marston cared for it no more.
Notes
76 In signing English documents, the Queen spelt her name “Margarete.”
77 What was meant by leprosy in the Middle Ages is an unsettled question. It was evidently a cutaneous disease of some kind, but is generally supposed not to have been identical with the oriental leprosy of which we read in Scripture.
78 Created Apr. 18th, 1475. He is said to have been previously made Earl of Huntingdon, Aug. 4, 1471—the second title of the Duke of Exeter: but I never found one instance when he was so termed on the Rolls.
79 The little silver ring which surrounds lace-holes in boots, stays, &c.