The Caged Lion

Excerpt

PREFACE

When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.  In the present case, it is scarcely necessary to do more than refer to the almost unique relations that subsisted between Henry V. and his prisoner, James I. of Scotland; who lived with him throughout his reign on the terms of friend rather than of captive, and was absolutely sheltered by this imprisonment throughout his nonage and early youth from the frightful violence and presumption of the nobles of his kingdom.

James’s expedition to Scotland is wholly imaginary, though there appears to have been space for it during Henry’s progress to the North to pay his devotions at Beverley Minster.  The hero of the story is likewise invention, though, as Froissart ascribes to King Robert II. ‘eleven sons who loved arms,’ Malcolm may well be supposed to be the son of one of those unaccounted for in the pedigrees of Stewart.  The same may be said of Esclairmonde.  There were plenty of Luxemburgs in the Low Countries, but the individual is not to be identified.  Readers of Tyler’s ‘Henry V.,’ 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 have ventured to say of the really historical personages.  Mr. Fox Bourne’s ‘English Merchants’ furnished the tradition respecting Whittington.  I am afraid the knighthood was really conferred on Henry’s first return to England, after the battle of Agincourt; but human—or at least story-telling—nature could not resist an anachronism of a few years for such a story.  The only other wilful alteration of a matter of time is with regard to the Duke of Burgundy’s interview with Henry.  At the time of Henry’s last stay at Paris the Duke was attending the death-bed of his wife, Michelle of France, but he had been several times in the King’s camp at the siege of Meaux.

Another alteration of fact is that Ralf Percy, instead of being second son of Hotspur, should have been Henry Percy, son of Hotspur’s brother Ralf; but the name would have been so confusing that it was thought better to set Dugdale at defiance and consider the reader’s convenience.  Alice Montagu, though her name sounds as if it came out of the most commonplace novelist’s repertory, was a veritable personage—the heiress of the brave line of Montacute, or Montagu; daughter to the Earl of Salisbury who was killed at the siege of Orleans; wife to the Earl of the same title (in her right) who won the battle of Blore Heath and was beheaded at Wakefield; and mother to Earl Warwick the King-maker, the Marquis of Montagu, and George Nevil, Archbishop of York.  As nothing is known 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 in Monstrelet of old, and now in Barante; though justice to her and Queen Isabeau compels me to state that the incident of the ring is wholly fictitious.  Of the trial of Walter Stewart no record is preserved save that he was accused of ‘roborica.’  James Kennedy was the first great benefactor to learning in Scotland, and founder of her earliest University, having been himself educated at Paris....