Earl Hubert's Daughter. Emily Sarah Holt
just two vices of which His English Majesty was not guilty, and those were cowardice and hypocrisy. He was a plain, unvarnished villain, and he never hesitated for a moment to let people see it. Queen Isabelle had been termed “the Helen of the Middle Ages,” alike from her great beauty, and from the fact that her husband abducted her when betrothed elsewhere. She can hardly be blamed for this, since she was a mere child at the time: but as she grew up, she developed a character quite worthy of the scoundrel to whom she was linked. To personal profligacy she added sordid avarice, and a positive incapacity for telling the truth. To these delightful persons the poor little Scottish maidens, Margaret and Isabel, were consigned. At what age Marjory joined them in England is doubtful: but it does not appear that she was ever, as they were, an official ward of the Crown.
The exact terms on which these royal children were sent into England were for many years the subject of sharp contention between their brother Alexander and King Henry the Third. The memorandum drawn up between the Kings William and John, does not appear to be extant: but that by which, in 1220, they were afresh consigned to the care of Henry the Third, is still in existence. Alexander strenuously maintained that John had undertaken to marry the sisters to his own two sons. The agreement with Henry the Third simply provides that “We will also marry (This meant at the time, ‘cause to be married’) Margaret and Isabel, sisters of the said Alexander, King of Scotland, during the space of one full year from the feast of Saint Denis (October 8), 1220, as shall be to our honour: and if we do not marry them within that period, we will return them to the said Alexander, King of Scotland, safe and free, in his own territories, within two years from the time specified.” (Note 1.)
This article of the convention was honestly carried out according to the later memorandum, so far as concerned Margaret, who was married to Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, at York, on the twenty-fifth of June, 1221. Isabel, however, was not married (to Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk) until May, 1225. (Note 2.) Still, after the latter date, the convention having been carried out, it might have been supposed that the Kings would have given over quarrelling about it. The Princesses were honourably married in England, which was all that Henry the Third at least had undertaken to do.
But neither party was satisfied. Alexander never ceased to reproach Henry for not having himself married Margaret, and united Isabel to his brother. Henry, while he testily maintained to Alexander that he had done all he promised, and no further claim could be established against him, yet, as history shows, never to the last hour pardoned Hubert de Burgh for his marriage with the Scottish Princess, and most bitterly reproached him for depriving him of her whom he had intended to make his Queen.
The truth seems to be that Henry the Third, who at the time of Margaret’s marriage was only a lad of thirteen years, had cherished for her a fervent boyish passion, and that she was the only woman whom he ever really loved. Hubert, at that time Regent, probably never imagined any thing of the kind: while to Margaret, a stately maiden of some twenty years, if not more, the sentimental courtship of a schoolboy of thirteen would probably be a source of amusement rather than sympathy. But at every turn in his after life, Henry showed that he had never forgiven this slight put on his affections. It is true that his affection was of a somewhat odd type, presenting no obstacle to his aspersing the character of his lady-love, when he found it convenient to point a moral by so doing. But of all men who ever lived, surely one of the most consistently inconsistent was Henry the Third. In most instances he was “constant to one thing—his inconstancy.” Like his father, he possessed two virtues: but they were not the same. Henry was not a lover of cruelty for its own sake—which John was: and he was not personally a libertine. Of his father’s virtues, bravery and honesty, there was not a trace in him. He covered his sins with an embroidered cloak of exquisite piety. The bad qualities of both parents were inherited by him. To his mother’s covetous acquisitiveness and ingrained falsehood, he joined his father’s unscrupulous exactions and wild extravagance.
I have said that Henry was not a lover of cruelty in itself: but he could be fearfully and recklessly cruel when he had a point to gain, as we shall see too well before the story is ended. It may be true that John murdered his nephew Arthur with his own hands; but it was reserved for Henry, out of the public sight and away from his own eyes, to perpetrate a more cruel murder upon Arthur’s hapless sister, “the Pearl of Bretagne,” by one of the slowest and most dreadful deaths possible to humanity, and without any offence on her part beyond her very existence. Stow tells us that poor Alianora was slowly starved to death; and that she died by royal order the Issue Roll gives evidence, since one hundred pounds were delivered to John Fitz Geoffrey as his fee for the execution of Alianora the King’s kinswoman. (Note 3.)
It is not easy to say whether John or Henry would have made the more clever vivisector. But assuredly, while John would have kept his laboratory door open, and have sneered at anaesthetics, Henry would have softly administered curare (Note 4), and afterwards made a charming speech on the platform concerning the sacrifices of their own feelings, which physiologists are sorrowfully compelled to make for the benefit of humanity and the exigencies of science.
Thirteen years after the marriage of Margaret of Scotland, when he was a young man of six-and-twenty, Henry the Third made a second attempt to win a Scottish queen. The fair Princess Marjory had now joined her sisters in England; and in point of age she was more suitable than Margaret. The English nobles, however, were very indignant that their King should think of espousing a younger sister of the wife of so mere an upstart as Hubert de Burgh. They grumbled bitterly, and the Count of Bretagne, brother-in-law of the murdered Arthur and the disinherited Alianora, took upon himself to dissuade the King from his purpose.
This Count of Bretagne is known as Pierre Mauclerc, or Bad-Clerk: not a flattering epithet, but historians assure us that Pierre only too thoroughly deserved the adjective, whatever his writing may have done. He had, four years before, refused his own daughter to King Henry, preferring to marry her to a son of the King of France. The Count had undertaken no difficult task, for an easier could not be than to persuade or dissuade Henry the Third in respect of any mortal thing. He passed his life in acting on the advice in turn of every person who had last spoken to him. So he gave up Marjory of Scotland.
Three years more had elapsed since that time, during which Marjory, very sore at her rejection, had withdrawn to the Court of King Alexander her brother. In the spring of 1234 she returned to her eldest sister, who generally resided either in her husband’s Town-house at Whitehall—it was probably near Scotland Yard—or at the Castle of Bury Saint Edmund’s. She was just then at the latter. Earl Hubert himself was but rarely at home in either place, being constantly occupied elsewhere by official duties, and not unfrequently, through some adverse turn of King Henry’s capricious favour, detained somewhere in prison.
“And how long hast thou nestled in this sweet new bower, my bird?” said Marjory caressingly to her niece.
“To-day, Aunt Marjory! It is a birthday present from my Lord and father. Is it not pretty? Only look at the walls, and the windows, and my beautiful velvet settle. Now, did you ever see any thing so charming?”
Marjory glanced at her sister, and they exchanged smiles.
“Well, I cannot quite say No to that question, Magot. (Note 5.) But lead me round this wonderful chamber, and show me all its beauties.”
The wonderful chamber in question was not very spacious, being about sixteen feet in length by twelve in width. It had a wide fireplace at one end—there was no fire, for the spring was just passing into summer—and two arched windows on one of its longer sides. The fireplace was filled with a grotto-like erection of fir-cones, moss, and rosemary: the windows, as Margaret triumphantly pointed out, were of that rare and precious material, glass. Three doors led into other rooms. One, opposite the fireplace, gave access to a small private oratory; two others, opposite the windows, communicated respectively with the wardrobe and the ante-chamber. These four rooms together, with the narrow spiral staircase which led to them, occupied the whole floor of one of the square towers of the Castle. The walls of the bower were painted green, relieved by golden stars; and on every wall-space between the doors and windows was a painted “history”—namely, a medallion of some Biblical, historical, or legendary subject. The subjects in this room had evidently been chosen with reference to the tastes of a girl. They were—the