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

value on his fingers, and the flagon from which he drank would be rimmed with rubies and emeralds.
    In an age of mad passions and deep superstitions, Henry was as full of common sense as a modern titan of industry. A story may be told to show how level was the head he carried on his great, muscular shoulders. When he returned from his one journey to Ireland, he stopped at St. David’s in Wales. An old woman approached him to beg for some favor. He did not grant it, and the beldame burst into a loud denunciation of him.
    “Avenge us, Lech-laver!” she screeched, waving her skinny arms above her head. “Avenge us this day!”
    The knights in Henry’s train turned pale in superstitious dread. Lech-laver had figured in a prophecy by Merlin. A king of England, returning from the conquest of Ireland, would meet his death on a rock of that name. A small stream ran by close at hand, and stretching across it was a rock of the most curious conformation. Clearly it did not owe its position to nature and it probably had been placed there by the Druids. A native, questioned by the uneasy knights, mumbled that this rock was called Lech-laver.
    In this day men were so full of superstition that they stared in dread if a shadow fell unexpectedly across the sky, fearing it might mean the end of the world. If a monk in some isolated monastery had a dream involving a king, any king, the abbot would send out mounted messengers to carry the story so that the ruler in question would be in a position to guard against what it portended. There were words which meant death if uttered by human lips, and men would die on the rack rather than speak them. Everyone had heard of Merlin’s prophecy and believed init implicitly, and so it was no wonder that Henry’s followers looked at the curiously shaped rock and begged him to ride away as fast as his horse could gallop.
    Henry laughed. He walked to the end of Lech-laver, mounted it, and crossed the stream to the other side. Then he retraced his steps without any haste. He was cool, amused, a little contemptuous. With an eye on the old woman, who had ceased her screeching and had watched him with fascinated fear, he said to his men:
    “Who will now have any faith in that liar Merlin?”
    Here, truly, was a man. How fortunate for England that the power fell into his hands at this time when the need was so great for the restoration of order after the anarchy. How much more fortunate it would have been if he had been content to rule the country, if he had not been consumed by an ambition which kept him away from the island for so much of his time. It has been estimated that of the thirty-five years of his reign only thirteen of them were spent in England. For the rest he was following a star which blazed directly above him and so blinded him that he found it hard to see anything else.
    A final word about his character: one writer of the day says, “When at peace, there was a great sweetness in his eyes.”
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    The first thing the young King did was to summon back the ministers of his grandfather, Henry I, who had been so recklessly discarded by the simple Stephen. Roger of Salisbury was dead, but his nephew Nigel, now Bishop of Ely, was appointed to the post of treasurer, which he had formerly filled. Robert de Lacey was made justiciar. They were old men but wise in the ways of the wise old King, and Henry showed good judgment in bringing them out of obscurity. At the head of his Council was the Archbishop of Canterbury, gentle and pious old Theobald.
    They held their first meeting on Christmas Day, 1154, in a small room of the chancellery. The eyes of Eleanor, his French wife, had been red that morning, and the ladies she had brought with her from the south sat around her in another small room in a dismal circle, extending their feet toward a tub of steaming water. To them Christmas was a day of sunshine and gentle winds softening the peal of the bells; and to see the snow piled up on the sills and to