THE BOAR’S HEAD INN, KING STREET.
and such as have incurred the penalties of the law. This child is not a criminal; he is too young to have committed any offense—Sanctuary is not for children; therefore to take this child is not to violate Sanctuary, and, since His Highness the King takes him only in kindness and in love, and for a companion to his brother, the wrath of St. Peter will not be awakened. On the other hand, the Holy Apostle cannot but commend the action.
The Archbishops yielded. Let us remember, with the bloodstained chronicles of the time in our mind, that, among all the nobles present at that Council, there was not one who could possibly fail to understand that the two boys were going to be murdered. How else could Richard keep the crown upon his head? Yet the two Archbishops yielded. They consented, therefore, knowing with the greatest certainty that murder would follow. I think they may have argued in some such way as this: “The time is evil; the country has been distracted and torn to pieces by civil wars for five-and-twenty years; nearly all the noble families have been destroyed; above and before everything else we need rest and peace and a strong hand. A hundred years ago, after the troubles in France, we had a boy for king, with consequences that may be still remembered by old men. If this boy reigns, there will be new disasters; if his uncle reigns, there may be peace. Life for two children, with more civil wars, more bloody fields, more ruin and starvation and rapine and violence; or the death of two children, with peace and rest for this long-suffering land—which shall it be?” A terrible alternative! The Archbishops sadly bowed their heads and stepped aside, while Richard climbed the winding stair, and in the upper chapel of the Sanctuary dragged the boy from his mother’s arms.
“Farewell!” she cried, her words charged with the anguish of her heart; “farewell, mine own sweet one! God send thee good keeping! Let me kiss thee once, ere you go. God knoweth when we shall kiss one another again!”
The right of Sanctuary in a modified form lasted long after the Dissolution of the Religious Houses. But when a great Abbey, as that of Beaulieu, standing in a retired and unfrequented place, lay desolate and in ruins, the right of Sanctuary was useless. No one was left to assert the right—no one to defend it; there was neither roof nor hearth nor altar. In great towns it was different; the Abbey might be desecrated, but the Sanctuary house remained. Therefore on the site of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, on the site of Blackfriars, and in Westminster round that old fortress-church, still the debtors ran to escape the bailiffs, and murderers and thieves hid themselves, knowing that the law was weak indeed in the network of courts and streets which formed these retreats. Other places pretended to immunity from the sheriffs; among these were the streets on the site of Whitefriars, Salisbury Court, Ram Alley, and Mitre Court; Fulwood’s Rents in Holborn, the Liberty of the Savoy, and, on the other side of the river, Deadman’s Place, the Clink, the Mint, and Montagu Close. The “privileges” of these places were finally abolished in 1697.
It was in the year of our Lord 1520, on a pleasant morning in May, that one who greatly loved to walk abroad in order to watch the ways of men, and to hear them discourse, stood at the entrance of King Street,
