Part 13

A royal banner floated from the battlements: the fortress had been formally taken into possession by the invaders in the name of their king, previously proclaimed at Dublin by the title of Edward the Sixth. The youth was crowned there with a diadem taken from an image of the Virgin, priests and nobles espousing his cause with more than ordinary enthusiasm; and Henry, in the second year of his reign, was threatened, from a source as unexpected as it was deemed contemptible, with the loss of his ill-gotten sovereignty.

Lambert Simnel, according to some historians, was the real name of this "pretender;" but there be others who scruple not to assert, that he was in reality the unfortunate Earl of Warwick, son to Clarence, elder brother of Richard III., and that he had made his escape from the Tower, where he long suffered an ignominious confinement by the cruel policy of Henry. The prior claims of this young prince to the English crown could not be doubted, and Margaret, the "bold" Duchess of Burgundy, sister to Edward IV., had furnished the invaders with a body of two thousand chosen Flemish troops, commanded by Martin Swartz, a brave and experienced officer. With them came the Earl of Lincoln, related to Edward IV. by intermarriage with Elizabeth, the king's eldest sister.

This nobleman had long entertained ambitious views towards the crown; his uncle Richard, it is said, in default of issue to himself, having expressed the intention of declaring Lincoln his successor. The Lord Lovel, too, a bitter enemy of the reigning prince, who had fled to the court of Burgundy beforetime for protection, was entrusted with a command in the expedition. To these were joined the Earl of Kildare, the king's deputy for Ireland, with several others of the nobility from the sister kingdom. The countenance thus unexpectedly given to the rebellion by persons of the highest rank, and the great accession of military force from abroad, raised the courage and exultation of the Irish to such a pitch that they threatened to overrun England, nothing doubting but their restless and disaffected spirit would be fully met by a similar disposition on the part of those whom they invaded. In supposing that the inhabitants in the north of England, and especially in Lancashire, would immediately join their standard, they had not calculated wisely. The king, in crushing the hopes of the Yorkists, had made himself, at that period, too popular in the county; the reluctance, too, which it may be supposed that Englishmen would feel in identifying themselves with a troop of foreign adventurers, as well as their general animosity against the Irish, to whom the "northerns" never bore any good-will, being too near neighbours to agree,--these circumstances taken into account, the ultimate failure of the expedition might have been easily prognosticated. Sir Thomas Broughton, a gentleman of some note in Furness, was the only person of weight and influence in the county who joined their standard, and he soon found himself a loser by his defection.

This brief preliminary statement we have thought essential to the right understanding and development of our plot.

The evening was dark and lowering, the sky broken into wild irregular masses of red and angry clouds. The sun, after throwing one fierce look over the broad and troubled sea, had sunk behind a hard, huge battlement of cloud, on the round waving edges of which ran a bright burning rim, that looked like a train of fire ignited by the glowing luminary behind.

The beach round the little island of Fouldrey is mostly covered with pebbles thrown up by the tide, occasionally intermingled with rock and patches of dark verdure. A few boats may be seen with their equipments, and two or three straggling nets upon the shore. A distant sail occasionally glides across the horizon; but the usual aspect is that of solitude, still and uninterrupted, the abode of sterility and sadness. Now, the narrow bay by the island was glittering with gallant streamers. Ships of war, in all their pride and panoply, majestically reposed upon its bosom. All was bustle and impatience. The trumpet-note of war brayed fiercely from the battlements. Incessant was the march of troops in various directions. Tents were pitched before the castle. Guards were appointed; and this hitherto peaceful and solitary spot resounded with the din of arms, and the hoarse clang of preparation for the approaching strife.

Messengers were constantly passing to and from the mainland. The insignia of royalty were ostentatiously displayed, and the captains and leaders within the fortress fulfilled the duties of this mimic and motley court in honour of their anticipated sovereign.

Under a steep cliff, washed by the sea at high water, but of no great height, and above which the higher walls of the castle or keep might be discovered, sat two fishermen, the owners, or rather occupiers, of one of the cottages built under the very walls of the fortress, where these peaceful inhabitants had placed their little nests, protected and covered by the wing of their loftier but more exposed and dangerous neighbour.

The place they had chosen for their conference was secluded from general observation, and their low and heavy speech was concealed from the prying sentinels above by the hoarse and impetuous voice of the retiring waves. Not many paces distant was the inlet to a subterraneous passage, supposed to lead under the deepest foundations of the castle; but its termination was now a mystery, at any rate, to the present occupiers and inhabitants of the place. Many strange and horrible stories were told and believed, of its uses and destination in times past. Being burdened with a bad name--"some uncleansed murder stuck to it"--the place ran little risk of disturbance or intruders. When the tides ran high this outlet was inaccessible, being partly flooded by the sea. From neglect and disuse an accumulation of sand and pebbles, washed by the violence of the waves into the cavity, was deposited there, so that the entrance, which, according to tradition was once wide and sufficiently lofty for a person to walk upright, was now dwindled into a narrow and insignificant-looking hole, scarcely big enough to admit an urchin.

"Thee hasna seen it thysel', then?" said one of the fishermen to his companion.

"Nea; I waur it' hoose man when it cam'; but"--the speaker looked wistfully towards the dark entrance we have named,--"but I'se sure Dick wouldna seay sae if"----

"Dick's a starin' gowk, and a coward too. I'se warrant there waur plenty o' room 'twixt his carcase and the wa'. That I'd bin there i'stead! There shouldn't ha' bin room to cram a herrin' tail atween me an' the ghost's substance. I would ha' hedged him up thus, an' then master ghost, taken aback, says, 'Friend, by yere sweet leave I would pass;' but I make out elbows, and arms this'n, facing till him so. Help! murder!"

This sudden change in the voice and attitude of the speaker, this sudden exhalation of his courage, unfortunately arose from the parties having, in the heat and interest of the discourse, turned their backs to the haunted entrance, and, so intent was Davy in accommodating the action to the valiant tenor of his speech, that it was only on turning round, for the purpose of showing to his companion the way in which he would have disputed a passage with the ghost, that he was aware for the first time of the presence of that terrible thing, and within a very few inches too of his own person. They stayed not for any further exemplification of this theory of ghost-laying, but in an instant were beyond observation, bounding over the beach, nor once looking behind them until safe in their little hut, and the door fastened against the fearful intruder. Davy, being foremost in the race, sat down, followed by his companion George, who, maugre his great apprehensions, could not forbear laughing heartily at the sudden melting away of the big-mouthed valour of this cowardly boaster.

"Praised be our lady of Furness," said the merry taunter, with many interruptions from laughter and want of breath; "thy heels are as glib as thy tongue: for which--oh, oh! I am breathed--blown--dispossessed of my birthright, free quaffing o' the air. Ha, ha! I cannot laugh. Oh! what a mouth didst thou make at old blacksleeves. Gaping so, I wonder he mistook not thy muzzle for one of the vents into his old quarters. A pretty gull thee be'st, to swallow yon black porpoise."

"I tell thee, messmate," returned the other, gravely, "thou hast miss'd thy tack. It waur but a slip, maybe a kin' of a sudden start which took me, as they say, by the nape. I jumped back, I own--a foul accident, by which he took advantage. He comes behind me, thou sees, and with a skip 'at would have seated him upo' the topmost perch o' the castle, he lights whack, thump, fair upo' my shoulders. I ran but to shake the whoreson black slug fro' my carcase. Saints ha' mercy, but his legs waur colder than a wet sheet. I soon unshipp'd my cargo, though--I tumbled him into the sea, made a present of old blacksleeves to the fishes!"

"Thou lying chub," said George, angrily, "did not I watch thee? Why, thou cub, thou cormorant, thou maker of long lies and quick legs, didst not o'ershoot me, ay, by some fathoms? I followed hard i' thy wake, but I see'd nought of all this bull-scuddering of thine. Faith, but thou didst ply thy courses with a wet sail!"

"Go to, Geordie--go to; a juggle, I tell thee; sheer malice of the enemy, fow' an' fause as he be." Here he spat on the floor to show his detestation and contempt; but George, either too ignorant or too idle to reply, took down a dried fluke from the chimney, and warming it on the glowing turf for a few minutes, was soon occupied in disposing of this dainty and favourite repast. Their hut was of the rudest construction. The walls were of boulder stones from the beach, loosely set up with mud and slime, and in several places decidedly deviating from the perpendicular. The roof was thatched with rushes, and shaped like unto a fish's back, having a marvellous big hump in the middle, upon which grew a fair tuft of long lank herbage, while bunches of the biting yellow stone-crop clung in irregular patches of bright green verdure about the extremities. The interior was lighted by a single casement, showing an assemblage of forms the most homely and primitive in their construction. The floor, paved with blue pebbles; the fireplace, a huge hearth-flag merely, on which lay a heap of glowing turf, an iron pot depending from a crook above. The smoke, curling lazily through a raft of fish drying a few feet above the flame, and acquiring the requisite flavour, with considerable difficulty reached a hole in the roof, where the adverse and refractory wind not unfrequently disputed its passage, and drove it down again, to assist the colds and rheums by its stimulating propensities. A broken chair, a three-legged stool, and a table with no greater number of supporters, a truckle-bed, and an accumulation of nets, oars, and broken implements of the like nature, were the usual deposits about the chamber. The two fishermen were partners in their gainful trade, and not having tasted the bliss of conjugal comforts, enjoyed a sort of negative good from the absence of evil, and lived a tolerably quiet and harmonious life in these outskirts of creation.

The few simple and primitive inhabitants of the island had been so bewildered and confounded by the turmoil and disorder consequent upon the invasion of their hitherto peaceful and quiet resting-place, that some half-dozen of them, for the first time in their lives, had quitted their homes; others, secure from their poverty and insignificance, still remained, though much disturbed with wonder and silly surmises, and ready to catch at any stray marvels that fell in their way. The subterraneous and half-concealed passage in the rock, or rather shale, on which the castle stands, always under the ban of some vague and silly apprehension, had been reported of late as manifesting more than equivocal symptoms of supernatural possession. Dick Empson, or long-nebbed Dick, a sort of shrewd, half-witted incarnation, it might be, of the goblin or elfin species, a runner of errands from the abbey of Furness to the castle, and a being whose pranks and propensities to mischief were well known in the neighbourhood, had affirmed, but a few hours before, that he saw a black figure on the previous night issuing from the hole; and that there was no connection or understanding between this ghostly appearance and the present occupiers of the castle, was evident from the mystery and secrecy that attended its movements. This was doubtless the phantom or goblin that, from time immemorial, had been the cause of such sinister dispositions towards the "haunted passage." Davy and his friend had unexpectedly stumbled upon its track, for they had not calculated on its appearance, at any rate before midnight.

In the Castle, Peel, or Pile of Fouldrey, on that night too, there was a mighty disturbance, not unaccompanied with vexation and alarm. It was soon after the first watch. The new-made monarch was asleep in his chamber--an ill-furnished apartment on the second floor of the main tower or keep, looking out by a narrow window towards the sea. The next, or middle chamber, was on a level, and communicating with the first landing, or principal entrance. The latter apartment, in which were the guards and others immediately about the king's person, served the purposes of an ante-room to the presence-chamber.

The room opposite--for there were three divisions on each floor--was subdivided into several parts, and occupied by the Earl of Lincoln and his attendants; the rooms above being devoted to Swartz, Lovel, and Fitzgerald, with their trains. Below were the guard-rooms and offices assigned to the staff, with the war stores and munitions belonging to the expedition.

In the same chamber with the king lay his confessor and chief adviser, one Simon, a wily and ambitious priest, who was the prime agent, if not mover, in this attempt to overturn the reigning power. No other individual was suffered to remain through the night in the king's apartment.

It was about the first watch, as before mentioned, when the guards and attendants were alarmed by loud cries from the royal chamber. They hastened to the door, but it was bolted, and their apprehensions for that time were allayed by the voice of the priest assuring them that the king was safe, but that an ugly dream had awakened him. Lincoln, whom this tumult had quickly brought to the spot, retired grumbling at so unseasonable a disturbance. Scarcely had an hour elapsed ere the cries were repeated. Unsheathing his sword, the proud Earl of Lincoln marched angrily to the door, and swore a loud broad oath that he would see the king or burst open the barrier. With him came others from the rooms overhead, so that the priest was forced, however unwillingly, to open the door, and Lincoln, accompanied by his friends, beheld the young pretender in bed, pale, and with a rueful countenance, still retaining the traces of some deadly horror.

"What hath disturbed your highness? We would fain know the cause of this alarm, and punish, ay punish home, the traitor!" said Lincoln, darting a furious look at the confessor, to whom he bore no good-will.

"Nay, friends, I shall--I shall be well presently. I beseech you be not disturbed. 'Tis a dream,--a vision that hath troubled me. I thought I was in the Tower--in my prison chamber--and the tyrant came and grasped me by the throat. With that I jumped up, and as Heaven is my witness, I saw a dark figure slip through the floor by yon grim buttress, behind which is the private staircase to the summit."

Every eye was turned towards the corner of the chamber near the bed, on the outside of which a winding staircase ran up from below, but they were ignorant of any communication from these stairs into the king's chamber. Lincoln examined the buttress with his sword, and Swartz, the Fleming, with his fingers, but there was no apparent opening or crevice that could betoken any outlet or concealment. The floor was examined, and with the same result; so that they were fain to depart, little doubting that the whole was the effect of some mental disturbance.

With the morning dawn came Sir Thomas Broughton. A grand council was appointed for that day, in which the final arrangement of their plans was to be discussed. A royal banquet was prepared, and the Flemish gunners were to give a specimen of their craft from the battlements.

The forenoon came on chill and squally, with a low scud driving rapidly from the west. A drizzling rain was the result, which increased with the coming tide.

The little island was covered with tents, forming an encampment of no mean extent and appearance.