“Treason is there in its most horrid shape,
Where trust is greatest.”
Herod the Great felt the pang when that dark and horrible secret, as Milman calls it, came to light, that Antipater, the beloved son, for whom he had imbrued his hands in the blood of his own children—Antipater, the heir of his kingdom—was “clearly proved to have conspired with Pheroras (B.C. 5) to poison his old and doting father, and thus to secure and accelerate his own succession.” Michelet’s narrative of the decline and death of the Emperor Frederick II. comprises this record: “Finally his chancellor, his dearest friend, Peter de Vineâ, attempted to poison him. After this last blow it only remained for him to veil his face, like Cæsar on the ides of March.” And familiar to us all is the story of our Henry II., sick and bedridden, inquiring the names of the supporters of his rebellious son Richard. He was for declaring John, the youngest of his sons, and as he thought the most attached to him, heir to all his continental dominions. But on hearing the name of his beloved John, highest on the list of Richard’s adherents, Henry was seized with a sort of convulsive agitation, sat up in bed, and gazing around with searching and haggard look, exclaimed, “Can it be true that John, my heart, the son of my choice, on whom I doted more than on all the rest, and my love for whom has brought on me all my woes, has fallen from me?” Assured that so it was, “Well then,” sighed Henry, falling back on his bed, and turning his face to the wall, “henceforward let all go on as it may; I no longer care for myself nor for the world.” And in this connection may be mentioned the dying exclamation of Henry’s murdered chancellor. “What is this, Reginald?” cried Becket to Fitzurse, when the latter made up to him, bared sword in hand: “I have loaded you with favours, and you come to me armed, and in the church?” The last stroke that broke down the aged Pope Boniface VIII., bowed with the weight of eighty-six years, was the defection of his favourite and favoured nephew. One may apply to such defections the upbraidal in a latter-day poem on Old Pictures in Florence:
“Giotto, how, with that soul of yours,
Could you play me false who loved you so?
Some slight if a certain heart endures,
It feels, I would have your fellows know.
Well—I perceive not why I should care
To break a silence that suits them best;
But the thing grows somewhat hard to bear