The Caged Lion
Page 1
Transcribed from the 1912 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, emailccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE CAGED LION
PREFACE
When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events andcharacters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow whatliberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded onhistory. In the present case, it is scarcely necessary to do more thanrefer to the almost unique relations that subsisted between Henry V. andhis prisoner, James I. of Scotland; who lived with him throughout hisreign on the terms of friend rather than of captive, and was absolutelysheltered by this imprisonment throughout his nonage and early youth fromthe frightful violence and presumption of the nobles of his kingdom.
James's expedition to Scotland is wholly imaginary, though there appearsto have been space for it during Henry's progress to the North to pay hisdevotions at Beverley Minster. The hero of the story is likewiseinvention, though, as Froissart ascribes to King Robert II. 'eleven sonswho loved arms,' Malcolm may well be supposed to be the son of one ofthose unaccounted for in the pedigrees of Stewart. The same may be saidof Esclairmonde. There were plenty of Luxemburgs in the Low Countries,but the individual is not to be identified. Readers of Tyler's 'HenryV.,' of Agnes Strickland's 'Queens,' Tytler's 'Scotland,' and Barante's'Histoire de Bourgogne' will be at no loss for the origin of all I haveventured to say of the really historical personages. Mr. Fox Bourne's'English Merchants' furnished the tradition respecting Whittington. I amafraid the knighthood was really conferred on Henry's first return toEngland, after the battle of Agincourt; but human--or at leaststory-telling--nature could not resist an anachronism of a few years forsuch a story. The only other wilful alteration of a matter of time iswith regard to the Duke of Burgundy's interview with Henry. At the timeof Henry's last stay at Paris the Duke was attending the death-bed of hiswife, Michelle of France, but he had been several times in the King'scamp at the siege of Meaux.
Another alteration of fact is that Ralf Percy, instead of being secondson of Hotspur, should have been Henry Percy, son of Hotspur's brotherRalf; but the name would have been so confusing that it was thoughtbetter to set Dugdale at defiance and consider the reader's convenience.Alice Montagu, though her name sounds as if it came out of the mostcommonplace novelist's repertory, was a veritable personage--the heiressof the brave line of Montacute, or Montagu; daughter to the Earl ofSalisbury who was killed at the siege of Orleans; wife to the Earl of thesame title (in her right) who won the battle of Blore Heath and wasbeheaded at Wakefield; and mother to Earl Warwick the King-maker, theMarquis of Montagu, and George Nevil, Archbishop of York. As nothing isknown of her but her name, I have ventured to make use of the blank.
For Jaqueline of Hainault, and her pranks, they are to be found inMonstrelet of old, and now in Barante; though justice to her and QueenIsabeau compels me to state that the incident of the ring is whollyfictitious. Of the trial of Walter Stewart no record is preserved savethat he was accused of '_roborica_.' James Kennedy was the first greatbenefactor to learning in Scotland, and founder of her earliestUniversity, having been himself educated at Paris.
The Abbey of Coldingham is described from a local compilation of theearly part of the century, with an account of the history of that grandold foundation, and the struggle for appointments between the parenthouse at Durham and the Scottish Government. Priors Akefield and Draxare historical, and as the latter really did commission a body of moss-troopers to divert an instalment of King James's ransom into his ownprivate coffers, I do not think I can have done him much injustice. Asthe nunnery of St. Abbs has gone bodily into the sea, I have been theless constrained by the inconvenient action of fact upon fiction. Andfor the Hospital of St. Katharine's-by-the-Tower, its history is to befound in Stowe's 'Survey of London,' and likewise in the evidence beforethe Parliamentary Commission, which shows what it was intended by QueenPhilippa to have been to the river-side population, and what it mighthave been had such intentions been understood and acted on--nay, what itmay yet become, since the foundation remains intact, although thebuilding has been removed.
C. M. YONGE.
November 24, 1869.