The Conquering Family by Thomas B. Costain Read Free Book Online

the saddle anyway, but the priestly clerks and scriveners were a different case. They were not trained to riding, and so it was unfortunate that Henry, that difficult and tumultuous man, did not believe in carriages, holding that their use tended to rob men of strength in their legs. When therefore the word flew through the offices of the
Curia Regis
and the humbler quarters of the chancellery that another terrible pilgrimage had been ordained, there would be a furious scramble for the gentlest palfreys and the least obstinate mules, and the disconsolate men of the court would pad themselves against the bruises and saddle burns of the canter.
    This mad young King! In addition to his accursed belief (to quote his staff) that a ruler should know his country and his people, he was completely unpredictable. The happy word would be circulated at Gloucester, say, that they would be staying all of the next day and night. The grateful servants and scriveners, and the hangers-on who always follow a king in progress—the dancers, the gamesters, the mountebanks, the jugglers, the prostitutes and pimps, all the parasites, in fact—would open their saddlebags in great content and settle themselves down for a rest on their straw pallets in corners of the packed inns. And then suddenly there would be a buzz of voices, a shouting of orders, the snapping of whips and the creaking of leather, and they would learn that their royal master (that rampaging bull of an Angevin!) had changed his mind. They were starting at once for Hereford!
    Henry might set ten o’clock of a morning for his departure and be up at dawn, roaring orders and bundling up state papers himself to facilitate an immediate start. He was a hard master, but hardest always on himself.
    He had an infallible memory, an inheritance from his otherwise insignificant father. He never forgot a good turn or an ill one, he never entirely lost an affection, and certainly he never relaxed a hatred; more, he carried this prodigious capacity into the smallest details, seeing the mean face of a lawyer and recalling every item of a squabble twenty years before over a hide of land, or hearing the whine of a beggar at Bishops-gate and recognizing him as a man-at-arms who had followed him to Wallingford.
    There are conflicting reports on his religious views. In some chronicles he is said to have been pious. It is written of him that he regularly watched with the monks of Merton for three full nights before Easter and that one of his favorite habits was to visit in disguise the churches of the poor. Others say he had no reverence in him, that he talked in church and scribbled on the back of the royal pew, that he seldom if ever confessed. One thing can be set down as true, that when his great temper was roused he blasphemed with all the ingenuity and color of an Arabstreet beggar. The truth lies somewhere between the extremes of opinion. An impression grows as one reads farther and farther into the fantastic annals of this reign that he had deep down within him the normal religious belief but that he lacked the patience for the observance of its outward forms.
    He was rough and ready in everything. It is a fact that he appeared at his coronation in a doublet and short Angevin cloak (which earned him in some chronicles the name of Curtmantle) made of rich brocade and that he fairly blazed with jewels. This was one occasion when a man had to appear at his best. Ordinarily he wore garments of costly materials which did not fit him because he refused to waste time with his tailors. He invariably looked like a king of the vagabonds or a squire who had been handed the used clothes of his master and who found them tight in the waist and cramping in shoulder. He considered it enough tribute to his high station if he wore on his person some insignia of royalty. When he desisted from his sauntering at meals to help himself to wine, his nails might show need of attention, but there would be rings of great