News of this extraordinary bill was soon spread all over England. It was printed in the newspapers amid other marvels, disasters, and atrocities, and mine host of the “Red Lion,” like Byron, woke up one morning to find himself famous. He would probably have preferred his native obscurity to the fierce light of publicity that beat upon him; for the country gentlemen, scandalized at his rapacity, boycotted his inn, and his brother innkeepers of Canterbury disowned him. The unfortunate man wrote to the St. James’s Chronicle, endeavouring to justify himself, and complaining bitterly of the harm that had been wrought to his business by the constant billeting of soldiers upon him. But it was in vain to protest, and so bitter was the feeling against him that his trade fell off, and he was ruined in six months.
THE DUC DE NIVERNAIS.
Meanwhile, the Duc de Nivernais was negotiating for peace at the Court of Saint James’s; and, what with the difficulties of diplomacy and the rigours of the climate, he passed but a miserable time. “This country,” he wrote, “is a cruel country for negotiation; one needs to have a body and a spirit of iron,” and how little like iron was his frame may perhaps be judged from this portraiture of him, which shows a wistful-looking, hollow-cheeked elderly man, with nose and chin and eyes unnaturally prominent. The caricaturists took a mean advantage of his phenomenal leanness, and called him the “Duke of Barebones,” and a Court witling made the cruel jest that “the French had sent over the preliminaries of an ambassador to conclude the preliminaries of a peace.” He eventually did conclude a peace, and, returning to Dover, left (how thankfully!) for France on May 22, 1763. Let us hope that, after all his trials with the English hotel-keepers and the English climate, he experienced a better passage across the Channel than when he first crossed it.
XXXV
HENRY THE EIGHTH
Not all visitors to Canterbury were so evilly entreated as the Duc de Nivernais. Indeed, the city has been remarkable rather for its lavish and abounding hospitality than for any attempted over-reaching of the stranger. But since those strangers were chiefly Kings and Emperors, and great personages of that kind, perhaps it is little to be wondered at that the citizens, to say nothing of those greedy time-servers, the Priors and monks of Christ Church Priory and the Priory of Saint Augustine, rendered to those great ones of the earth the most abject suit and service. Almost every English sovereign has been here at some time or another, and many a foreign potentate besides. Henry the Second, it is true, walked into the city, barefoot, from Harbledown, and so to the Cathedral, doing abject penance for the murder of Becket, four years previously, and it seems to be equally true that as he proceeded to Becket’s shrine he was scourged by the monks on his bare back and shoulders with knotted cords; but I think they would have laid on harder and with a better will had the penitent not been of so exalted a station. In short, I have little faith in the reported rigours of that punishment. A few years later came Henry’s son, Richard Lion Heart, enlarged from his foreign prison. He landed at the port of Sandwich, and walked barefoot into Canterbury—so inimical was Saint Thomas to shoe-leather. Edward the First was pious enough to lay the Crown of Scotland before the Saint’s shrine, and another Edward—the Black Prince—came here, in all humility, with the captive King of France. Another warrior, as brave and as ill-fated—Henry the Fifth—paid his devoirs to Becket as he came up the road, fresh from his glorious French campaigns. Another Henry, the Eighth and last of his name, bowed before the shrine in 1520, in company with the Emperor Charles the Fifth. On that occasion he was as fervent a worshipper as could well be desired, and as sincere as it is possible for a man to be who is at the same time a King and half a Welshman. No thoughts of spoliation of the Church then passed his mind. Indeed, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the time made much of his visit, which seems to have been celebrated in a more than royal manner, if we may trust the chroniclers.
From Dover the two monarchs rode into Canterbury, preceded by Wolsey, and followed by a long procession of knights and esquires, men-at-arms and archers. The clergy, dressed in all the splendour of which the Romish Church is capable, thronged the streets to welcome the King, and knew as little about the calamities presently to befall them as fat geese suspect the significance of Michaelmas Day. Archbishop Warham welcomed the sovereigns to the Cathedral, and probably thought with a secret joy upon the ways of Providence which had removed Prince Arthur from this world to place his younger brother, Henry, upon the throne. For, had Prince Arthur lived to be King of England, the man whom we know as Henry the Eighth would have been Archbishop of Canterbury. That was the career designed for him, and, had Prince Arthur not died, how very differently things might have been fashioned!