The bar of the House of Lords. Peers in their Parliament robes fill all the benches, and at their head sits the Regent,—Prince Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the representative Rationalist of the fifteenth century. He was no Papist, for he disliked and despised Romish superstitions; yet no Lollard, for he was utterly incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of God. Henry the Fifth now lies entombed at Westminster, and on the throne is his little son of nine years old, for whom his uncle Humphrey reigns and rules. There comes forward to the bar a fair-haired, stately woman, robed in the ermine and velvet of a countess. She is asked to state her name and her business. The reply comes in a clear voice.
“My name is Alianora Touchet, Lady de Audley; and I am the only daughter and heir of Sir Edmund de Holand, sometime Earl of Kent, and of Custance his wife, daughter unto Sir Edmund of Langley, Duke of York. I claim the lands and coronets of this my father—the earldom of Kent, and the barony of Wake de Lydel.”
Her evidences are received and examined. The case shall be considered, and the petitioner shall receive her answer that day month. She bows and retires.
And then down from her eyrie, like a vengeful eagle, swoops the old Duchess Joan of York—the sister of Kent, the step-mother of Constance—who has two passions to gratify, her hatred to the memory of the one, and her desire to retain her share of the estates of the other. She draws up her answer to the claim,—astutely disappearing into the background, and pushing forward her simpler sister Margaret, entirely governed by her influence, as the prominent objector. She forgets nothing. She urges the assent and consent of Henry the Fourth to the marriage of Lucia, the presence of Constance at the ceremony, and every point which can give weight to her objection. She prays, therefore—or Margaret does for her—that the claim of the aforesaid Alianora may be adjudged invalid, and the earldom of Kent extinct.
Lady Audley reappears on the day appointed. It is the same scene again, with Duke Humphrey as president; who informs her, with calm judicial impartiality, that her petition is rejected, her claim disallowed, and her name branded with the bar sinister for ever. But as she leaves the bar, denied and humiliated, her hand is drawn gently into another hand, and a voice softly asks her—“Am not I better to thee than ten coronets?”
And so they pass away.
The second dissolving view has disappeared; and the last slowly grows before our sight.
A dungeon in the Tower of London. There is only a solitary prisoner,—a man of fifty years of age, moderate in stature, but very slightly built, with hands and feet which would be small even in a woman. His face has never been handsome; there are deep furrows in the forehead, and something more than time has turned the brown hair grey, and given to the strongly-marked features that pensive, weary look, which his countenance always wears when in repose. Ask his name of his gaolers, and they will say it is “Sir Henry of Lancaster, the usurper;” but ask it of himself, and a momentary flash lights up the sunken eyes as he answers, “I am the King.”
Neither Pharisee nor Sadducee is Henry the Sixth. He is not a Lollard, simply because he never knew what Lollardism was. During his reign it lay dormant—the old Wycliffite plant violently uprooted, the new Lutheran shoots not yet visible above the ground. He was one of the very few men divinely taught without ostensible human agency,—within whom God is pleased to dwell by His Spirit at an age so early that the dawn of the heavenly instinct cannot be perceived. From the follies, the cruelties, and the iniquities of Romanism he shrank with that Heaven-born instinct; and by the dim flickering light which he had, he walked with God. His way led over very rough ground, full of rugged stones, on which his weary feet were bruised and torn. But it was the way Home.