Plot and Counterplot.
“He that hath a thousand friends hath not a friend to spare,
And he that hath one enemy shall find him everywhere.”
On the evening of Constance’s arrival at Langley, two men sat in close conference in the Jerusalem Chamber of the Palace of Westminster. One of them was a priest, the other a layman. The first priest, and the first layman, in the realm; for the elder was Thomas de Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the younger was Henry of Bolingbroke, King of England.
The Archbishop was a tall, stout, portly man, with a round, fair, fat face, on which sat an expression of extreme self-complacency. A fine forehead, both broad and high, though slightly too retreating, surmounted a pair of clear, bright grey eyes, a well-formed nose, and lips in which there was no weakness, but they were just a shade too smiling for sincerity. Though his age was only fifty-one, his hair was snow-white. Of course his face was closely shaven; for it is an odd fact that the higher a man’s sacerdotal pretensions rise, the more unlike a man he usually makes himself—resembling the weaker sex as much as possible, both in person and costume. This man’s sacerdotal pretensions ran very high, and accordingly his black cassock fell about his feet like a woman’s dress, and his face was guiltless of beard or whisker.
The age of the King was thirty-eight, and he was one of the tallest men in his kingdom. The colour of his hair, whiskers, and small forked beard, was only one remove from black. Dark pencilled eyebrows, of that surprised shape which many persons admire, arched over keen liquid dark eyes. The general type of the features was Grecian; their regularity was perfect, but the nose was a trifle too prominent for pure Grecian. About the set of the lips, delicately as they were cut, there was a peculiarity which a physiognomist might have interpreted to mean that when their owner had once placed a particular end before him, no considerations of right on the one hand, or of friendship on the other, would be allowed to interfere with its attainment. This was a very clever man, a very sagacious, far-seeing man, a very handsome man, a very popular man; yet a man whom no human heart ever loved, and who never loved any human being—a man who could stand alone, and who did stand alone, to the hour when, “with all his imperfections on his head,” he stood before the bar of God.
“The match is no serviceable one,” said the Archbishop.
“Truth to tell,” replied the King a little doubtfully, “I scarce do account my cousin herself an heretic:—yet I wis not—she may be. But she hath been rocked in the heresy in her cradle, and ever sithence hath been within earshot thereof. You wot well, holy Father, what her lord was; and his mother, with whom she hath dwelt these ten years or more, is worser than himself. Now it shall never serve to have Kent lost to the Church her cause. You set affiance on him, I know, and I the like: and if he be not misturned, methinks he may yet prove a good servant. But here is this alliance cast in our way! I know they be wed without my licence: yet what should it serve to fine or prison him? To prison her might be other matter; but we cannot touch her. So this done should not serve our turn. Father, is there any means that you can devise to break this marriage?”
“The priest that wed them is a Gospeller,” returned the Archbishop with a peculiar smile.
“A priest in full orders,” objected the King, “of good life and unblemished conversation. Even you, holy Father, so fertile in wise plans, shall scarce, methinks, be able to lay finger on him.”
“Scantly; without he were excommunicate of heresy at the time this wedding were celebrate.”