Earl Hubert's Daughter. Emily Sarah Holt

attempt almost to the death. There was a perpetual struggle, greater or smaller according to circumstances, between the King of England and the Papacy, Pope after Pope endeavoured to fill English sees and benefices with Italian priests: King after King braved his wrath by refusing to confirm his appointments. Apostle, they were ready to allow the Pope to be: sovereign or legislator, never. Doctrine they would accept at his hands; but he should not rule over their secular or ecclesiastical liberties. The quarrel between Henry the Second and Becket was entirely on this point. No wonder that Rome canonised the man who thus exalted her. The Kings who stood out most firmly for the liberties of England were Henry the Second, John, Edward the First and Second, and Richard the Second. This partly explains the reason why history (of which monks were mainly the authors) has so little good to say of any of them, Edward the First only excepted. It is not easy to say why the exception was made, unless it were because he was too firmly rooted in popular admiration, and perhaps a little too munificent to the monastic Orders, for much evil to be discreetly said of him. Coeur-de-Lion was a Gallio who cared for none of those things: Henry the Third played into the hands of the Pope to-day, and of the Anglican Church to-morrow. Edward the Third held the balance as nearly even as possible. The struggle revived faintly during the reign of Henry the Sixth, but the Wars of the Roses turned men’s minds to home affairs, and Henry the Seventh was the obedient servant of His Holiness. So the battle went on, till it culminated in the Reformation. Those who have never entered into this question, and who assume that all Englishmen were “Papists” until 1530, have no idea how gallantly the Church fought for her independent life, and how often she flung from off her the iron grasp of the oppressor. It was not probable that a Princess whose fathers had followed the rule of Columba, and lay buried in Protestant Iona, should have any Roman tendencies on this question. Marjory was as warm as any one could have wished her.

      “Well, then,” Margaret went on, “that horrid Bishop of Winchester—”

      “Oh, fie!” said her aunt.

      ”—Came back to England in August. Aunt Marjory, it is no use—he is horrid, and I hate him! He hates my fair father. Do you expect me to love him?”

      “Well done, Magot!” said another voice. “When I want a lawyer to plead my cause, I will send for thee.—Christ save you, fair Sister! I heard you were here, with this piece of enthusiasm.”

      Both the girls rose to greet the Earl, Margaret courtesying low as beseemed a daughter.

      It was very evident that, so far as outside appearance went, Margaret was “only the child of her mother.” Earl Hubert was scarcely so tall as his wife, and he had a bronzed, swarthy complexion, with dark hair. Though short, he was strongly-built and well-proportioned. His eyes were dark, small, but quick and exceedingly bright. He had, when needful, a ready, eloquent tongue and a very pleasant smile. Yet eloquent as undoubtedly he could be, he was not usually a man of many words; and capable as he was of very deep and lasting affection, he was not demonstrative.

      The soft, caressing manners of the Princess Margaret were not in her husband’s line at all. He was given to calling a spade a spade whenever he had occasion to mention the article: and if she preferred to allude to it as “an agricultural implement for the trituration of the soil,” he was disposed to laugh good-humouredly at the epithet, though he dearly loved the silver voice which used it.

      A thoroughly representative man of his time was Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent; and he was one of those persons who leave a deep mark upon their age. He was a purely self-made man. He had no pedigree: indeed, we do not know with absolute certainty who was his father, though modern genealogists have amused themselves by making a pedigree for him, to which there is no real evidence that he had the least claim. Yet of his wives—for he was four times married—the first was an heiress, the second a baron’s widow, the third a countess in her own right and a divorced queen, and the last a princess. His public life had begun by his conducting a negotiation to the satisfaction of Coeur-de-Lion, in the first year of his reign, 1189, when in all probability Hubert was little over twenty years of age. From that moment he rose rapidly. Merely to enumerate all the titles he bore would almost take a page. He was by turns a very rich man and a very poor one, according as his royal and capricious master made or revoked his grants.

      The religious character of Hubert is not a matter of speculation, but of certainty. It was—what his contemporaries considered elevated piety—a most singular mixture of the barest and basest superstition with some very strong plain common-sense. The superstition was of the style set forth in the famous Spanish drama entitled “The Devotion of the Cross”—the true Roman type of piety, though to Protestant minds of the nineteenth century it seems almost inconceivable. The hero of this play, who is represented as tinctured with nearly every crime which humanity can commit, has a miracle performed in his favour, and goes comfortably to Heaven after it, on account of his devotion to the cross. The innocent reader must not suspect the least connection between this devotion and the atonement wrought upon the cross. It simply means, that whenever Eusebio sees the shape of a cross—in the hilt of his sword, the pattern of a woman’s dress, two sticks thrown upon one another—he stops in the midst of whatever sin he may be committing, and in some form, by word or gesture, expresses his “devotion.”

      Of this type was Hubert’s religion. His notion of spirituality was to grasp the pix with one hand, and to hold the crucifix in the other. He kept a nicely-balanced account at the Bank of Heaven, in which—this is historical—the heaviest deposit was the fact that he had many years before saved a large crucifix from the flames. The idea that this action was not most pious and meritorious would have been in Hubert’s eyes rank heresy. Yet he might have known better. The Psalter lay open to him, which, had he been acquainted with no other syllable of revelation, should alone have given him a very different conception of spiritual religion.

      Athwart these singular notions of excellence, Hubert’s good common-sense was perpetually gleaming, like the lightning across a dark moor. Whatever else this man was, he was no slave of Rome. It was supported by him, and probably at his instigation, that King John had sent his lofty message to the Pope, that—

      “No Italian priest

       Should tithe or toll in his dominions.”

      It was when the administration lay in his hands that Parliament refused to comply with the demands of the Pope till it was seen what other kingdoms would do: and no Papal aggressions were successful in England so long as Hubert was in power. To reverse the famous phrase of Lord Denbigh, Hubert was “a Catholic, if you please; but an Englishman first.”

      Truer Englishman, at once loyalist and patriot, never man was than he—well described by one of the English people as “that most faithful and noble Hubert, who so often saved England from the ravages of the foreigner, and restored England to herself.” He stood by the Throne, bearing aloft the banner of England, in three especially dark and perilous days, when no man stood there but himself. To him alone, under Providence, we owe it that England did not become a vassal province of France. Most amply was his fidelity put to the test; most unspotted it emerged from the ordeal: most heavy was the debt of gratitude owed alike by England and her King.

      That debt was paid, in a sense, to the uttermost farthing. In what manner of coin it was discharged, we are about to see.

      Note 1. Patent Roll, 4 Henry Third; dated York, June 15 1220.

      Note 2. “In the octave of Holy Trinity” (May 25—June 1), at Alnwick.—Roberts’ Extracts from Fines Rolls, 1225.

      Note 3. This terrible fact has been strangely ignored by many modern historians.—Rot. Exit., Michs., 25–6 Henry Third.

      Note 4. A drug which deadens the sensibilities—of the vivisector—by rendering the victim incapable of sound or motion, but not affecting the nerves of sensation in the least.

      Note 5. This was in 1234, when our story begins, the English diminutive of Margaret, and was doubtless derived from the French Margot.

      Note 6. Any reader who is inclined to doubt this is requested to consult Acts fifteen, 4, 22. It is unquestionably the teaching of the New Testament. The clergy form part of the Church merely as individual Christians.