There he sat, the man for whose sake great kingdoms were being blasted with fire and sword, and thousands dying daily in the fierce shock of battle, or by the slow agony of famine and disease. Strong, wise, brave, comely, famed alike as king, statesman, general, courtier, and man-at-arms, he had power to do more good, and, alas! used that power to do more evil, than any other man of his time. Little could he then foresee, in the heyday of his might and the splendour of victories at which the whole world stood amazed, that, less than thirty years later, the curses of all Western Europe and the cold indifference of his own neglected people would follow to his grave an old, worn-out, childless, broken-hearted man, stripped of nearly all his hard-won conquests, and robbed on his very death-bed by a worthless favourite.
There was a knock at the door, and a richly clad chamberlain said with a low bow—
“My lord king, Sir Aymery de Pavia of Lombardy, governor of Calais, whom your grace was pleased to command hither, awaits your pleasure.”
The great king started slightly, and over his noble face flickered for a moment a smile more stern, and menacing, and terrible, than his blackest frown, but he only said—
“Bid Sir Aymery enter.”
In came a tall, portly man in a rich suit of gilded armour, whose dark Southern face would have been strikingly handsome, but for the cunning, ever-shifting restlessness of the keen black eyes, and a sinister compression of the thin lips, suggestive of that ingrained Italian treachery which was then, and for many a generation after, the byword of all Europe in a bitter verse as true as it was severe—
“When Italy from poison is,
And France from treason, free,
And war’s not found on English ground,
The world shall cease to be.”