The devoted Leverous had refused to leave his charge even in care so seemingly unexceptionable as this; and the king, having ordered a large reward to be offered for the boy, O’Donnel was soon discovered by this watchful guardian to be meditating the baseness of delivering the orphan into Henry’s hands. Seeking the Lady Eleanor, Leverous unfolded this intended villany, and causing Gerald to assume a sufficient disguise, his aunt gave him what money she could gather in haste, and shipped him at once with his tutor and another old servant of his father’s, in a vessel bound to St. Malo, in Brittany. The safety of the boy thus secured, she next sought her husband, and bidding him remember that her interest in this child had been the sole cause of her marriage with him, she declared that all future intercourse with a man who had so basely broken his promise, and that for so mercenary a motive, was impossible, and gathering her possessions together, she departed to her own country. Gerald meanwhile had been well received by the King of France; but Sir John Wallop, the English ambassador, having demanded him in the name of King Henry, the French king took time to consider; and Leverous, fearing the result, again bore his charge from the threatening danger, and took refuge with him in Flanders, in the house of a cottager, whose daughter waited upon Gerald with the utmost kindness. They had not been long here before it was perceived that their every step was dogged by an Irish servant of Sir John Wallop. The governor of Valenciennes, befriending the orphan, threw this man into prison; but he was liberated by the generous intercession of the youth whom he had sought to betray, and Gerald reached the Emperor’s court at Brussels without farther molestation.
He was here again demanded by the English ambassador, but the Emperor excused himself on the plea that Gerald’s youth sufficiently attested his innocence, and sent him privately to the Bishop of Liege, with a pension of one hundred crowns a month. Here he remained in comfort and safety for six months, when Cardinal Pole, his mother’s kinsman, invited him into Italy, and, allowing him an annuity, placed him first with the Bishop of Verona, and afterwards with the Duke of Mantua; but would not admit him to his own presence until he had first acquired the Italian language, an extraordinary condition, the Cardinal’s English parentage considered.
This accomplished, however, the Cardinal summoned his young kinsman to Rome, and had him instructed, under his own eye, in all the accomplishments then required to constitute the finished gentleman. At the age of nineteen, his generous patron permitted him to choose between continuing his studies or traveling for adventures, as was then the custom. Gerald chose the latter, and falling in with some knights of Rhodes, he joined them in the fierce wars they were then waging against “the Turks and miscreants.”
Returning to Rome laden with rich booty, “proud was the Cardinal to hear of his exploits,” and proud also we may be sure was another priest; for the faithful Leverous still clung to the fortunes of the child he had saved. Soon after this “fighting with Turks and miscreants,” the Cardinal having increased the pension of Gerald to £300 a year (a very large income in those days), permitted him to enter the service of Cosmo, Duke of Florence, with whom he remained three years as master of the horse; a very honorable appointment.
His exile at length terminated by the death of Henry. Gerald Fitzgerald proceeded to London, still accompanied by his attached Leverous. Appearing at King Edward’s court, he saw the daughter of Sir Anthony Brown at a ball, and afterwards marrying this lady, her family procured the restitution of a part of his estates from the king, who also knighted him. Under Mary he was restored to all the titles and honors of his house, all which, and the prosperity of his middle life, was witnessed by the happy Leverous, who died at a good old age under the roof of his grateful pupil, by whom he was ever honored as a father. The Earl himself lived till far into the reign of Elizabeth, closing his life peacefully in the year 1585.
FAITHFUL FIDO.
“What shall I do,” said a very little dog one day to his mother, “to show my gratitude to our good master? I cannot draw, or carry burthens for him like the horse; nor give him milk like the cow; nor lend him my covering for his clothing, like the sheep; nor produce him eggs like the poultry; nor catch rats and mice as well as the cat.