“I marvel at times, Ned, if it shall not seem strange one day that we ever set heart overmuch on anything, save only to have ‘washen our stolis in the blood of the Lamb, that the power of us be in the tree of life, and enter by the gates into the city.’”
“When art thou shorn priest?” asked Edward cynically.
“I will do thee to wit in time to see it,” said Richard more lightly, as they rode across the drawbridge at Langley.
How far did Edward play the traitor in this matter of the attempted rescue of the Mortimers? It cannot be said distinctly that he did at all; but he had played the traitor on so many previous occasions—he had assisted in hatching so many conspiracies for the mere object of denouncing his associates—that the suspicion of his having done so in this instance is difficult to avoid. And the strangest point of all is, that to the last hour of his life this man played with Lollardism. He used it like a cloak, throwing it on or off as circumstances demanded. He spent his life in deceiving and betraying every friend in turn, and at last told the truth in dying, when he styled himself “of all sinners the most wicked.”
Three days after that evening, the House of Lords sat in “Parliament robes,” in Westminster Hall. But the King was not present: and there were several peers absent, in attendance on His Majesty; among them the Duke of York, the Earl of Cambridge, and the Earl of Kent. The House had met to try a prisoner: and the prisoner was solemnly summoned by a herald’s voice to the bar.
“Custance of Langley, Baroness of Cardiff!”
Forward she came, with firm step and erect head, clad in velvet and ermine, as beseemed a Princess of England: and with a most princess-like bend of her stately head, she awaited the reading of the charge against her.
The charge was high treason. The prisoner’s answer was a simple point-blank denial of its truth.
“What mean you?” demanded the Lords. “No did you, by means of false keys, gain entrance into the privy chambers of our Lord the King in the Castle of Windsor?”
“I did so.”