“Forsooth, and if it please your Majesty,” said De Vaux, “I hear consultations have been held among the royal leaders for some such purpose.”
“Ha!” exclaimed Richard, his jealousy awakened, giving his mental irritation another direction, “am I forgot by my allies ere I have taken the last sacrament? Do they hold me dead already? But no, no, they are right. And whom do they select as leader of the Christian host?”
“Rank and dignity,” said De Vaux, “point to the King of France.”
“Oh, ay,” answered the English monarch, “Philip of France and Navarre—Denis Mountjoie—his most Christian Majesty! Mouth-filling words these! There is but one risk—that he might mistake the words EN ARRIERE for EN AVANT, and lead us back to Paris, instead of marching to Jerusalem. His politic head has learned by this time that there is more to be gotten by oppressing his feudatories, and pillaging his allies, than fighting with the Turks for the Holy Sepulchre.”
“They might choose the Archduke of Austria,” said De Vaux.
“What! because he is big and burly like thyself, Thomas—nearly as thick-headed, but without thy indifference to danger and carelessness of offence? I tell thee that Austria has in all that mass of flesh no bolder animation than is afforded by the peevishness of a wasp and the courage of a wren. Out upon him! He a leader of chivalry to deeds of glory! Give him a flagon of Rhenish to drink with his besmirched baaren-hauters and lance-knechts.”
“There is the Grand Master of the Templars,” continued the baron, not sorry to keep his master's attention engaged on other topics than his own illness, though at the expense of the characters of prince and potentate. “There is the Grand Master of the Templars,” he continued, “undaunted, skilful, brave in battle, and sage in council, having no separate kingdoms of his own to divert his exertions from the recovery of the Holy Land—what thinks your Majesty of the Master as a general leader of the Christian host?”
“Ha, Beau-Seant?” answered the King. “Oh, no exception can be taken to Brother Giles Amaury; he understands the ordering of a battle, and the fighting in front when it begins. But, Sir Thomas, were it fair to take the Holy Land from the heathen Saladin, so full of all the virtues which may distinguish unchristened man, and give it to Giles Amaury, a worse pagan than himself, an idolater, a devil-worshipper, a necromancer, who practises crimes the most dark and unnatural in the vaults and secret places of abomination and darkness?”
“The Grand Master of the Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem is not tainted by fame, either with heresy or magic,” said Thomas de Vaux.
“But is he not a sordid miser?” said Richard hastily; “has he not been suspected—ay, more than suspected—of selling to the infidels those advantages which they would never have won by fair force? Tush, man, better give the army to be made merchandise of by Venetian skippers and Lombardy pedlars, than trust it to the Grand Master of St. John.”