At a time of great misfortunes, when his treasurer had only four crowns in his coffers, Charles went into his oratory to pray alone, and he made his prayer to God secretly, not aloud, but in his mind.

Now, what Joan told the king was the secret prayer which he had made in his own heart when alone. And ten years later, when Joan was long dead, an impostor went about saying that she was the Maid, that she had come to life again. She was brought to Charles, who said, “Maiden, my Maid, you are welcome back again if you can tell me the secret that is between you and me.”

But the false Maid, falling on her knees, confessed all her treason.

But the king to whom Joan brought this wonderful message, the king whom she loved so loyally, and for whom she died, spoiled all her plans. He, with his political advisers, prevented her from driving the English quite out of France. These favorites found their profit in dawdling and delaying, as politicians generally do. They were lazy, comfortable, cowardly, disbelieving; in their hearts they hated the Maid, who put them to so much trouble.

Charles, to tell the truth, never really believed in her; he never quite trusted her; he never led a charge by her side; and in the end, he shamefully deserted her and left the Maid to her doom.

Weeks had passed, and Joan had never yet seen a blow struck in war. She used to exercise herself in horsemanship and knightly sports of tilting, and it is wonderful that a peasant girl became, at once, one of the best riders among the chivalry of France.

It was now determined that Joan should be taken to Poitiers and examined before all the learned men, bishops, doctors, and higher clergy who still were on the side of France. There was good reason for this delay. It was plain to all, friends and foes, that the wonderful Maid was not like other men and women, with her Voices, her visions, her prophecies, and her powers. All agreed that she had some strange help given to her; but who gave it? This aid must come, people thought then, either from Heaven or Hell—either from God and his saints or from the devil and his angels.

Now, if any doubt could be thrown on the source whence Joan’s aid came, the English might argue (as of course they did) that she was a witch and a heretic. If she was a heretic and a witch, then her king was involved in her wickedness, and so he might be legally shut out from his kingdom.

It was necessary, therefore, that Joan should be examined by learned men. They must find out whether she had always been good, and a true believer, and whether her Voices always agreed in everything with the teachings of the Church. Otherwise, her angels must be devils in disguise. During three long weeks the learned men asked her questions. They said it was wonderful how wisely this girl replied to their puzzling inquiries. She told the story of her visions and of the command laid upon her to rescue Orleans.

Said Guillaume Aymeri, “You ask for men-at-arms, and you say that God will have the English to leave France and go home. If that is true, no men-at-arms are needed; God’s pleasure can drive the English out of the land.”

“In God’s name,” said the Maid, “the men-at-arms will fight, and God will give the victory.”

Then came the learned Seguin, “a right sour man was he,” said those who knew him. Seguin was a Limousin, and the Limousins spoke in a queer accent at which the other French were always laughing.

“In what language do your Voices speak?” asked he.

“In a better language than yours,” said Joan, and the bishops smiled at the country quip.

“We may not believe in you,” said Seguin, “unless you show us a sign.”

“I did not come to Poitiers to work miracles,” said Joan. “Take me to Orleans, and I shall show you the signs that I am sent to do.”

And show them she did. Joan never pretended to work miracles. Though, in that age, people easily believed in miracles, it is curious that none worth mentioning were invented about Joan in her own time.

At last, after examining witnesses from Domremy, and the Queen of Sicily, and other great ladies to whom Joan was entrusted, the clergy found nothing in her but “goodness, humility, frank maidenhood, piety, honesty, and simplicity.” As for her wearing a man’s dress, the Archbishop of Embrim said to the king, “It is more becoming to do these things in man’s clothes since they have to be done amongst men.”

The king therefore made up his mind at last. Jean and Pierre, Joan’s brothers, were to ride with her to Orleans; her old friends—her first friends—Jean de Nouillompont and Bertrand de Poulengy, had never left her. She was given a squire, a page, and a chaplain. The king gave Joan armor and horses and offered her a sword. But her Voices told her that, behind the altar of St. Catherine de Fierbois, where she heard mass on her way to Chinon, there was an old sword with five crosses on the blade, buried in the earth. That sword she was to wear.

A man whom Joan did not know and had never seen was sent from Tours, and he found the sword in the place which she described. The sword was cleaned of rust, and the king gave her two sheaths—one of velvet, one of cloth of gold—but Joan had a leather sheath made for use in war. She also commanded a banner to be made with the lilies of France on a white field.

The End, Part Five

Robert was now half disposed to send her to the king and let her take her chance. But days dragged on, and when Joan was not working, she would be on her knees in the crypt or underground chapel of the Chapel Royal in Vaucouleurs. Twenty-seven years later a chorister boy told how he often saw her praying there for France. Now people began to hear of Joan, and the Duke of Lorraine asked her to visit him at Nancy, where she bade him lead a better life. He is said to have given her a horse and some money.

On February 12, the story goes, Joan of Arc went to Robert de Baudricourt. “You delay too long,” she said. “On this very day, at Orleans, the gentle Dauphin has lost a battle.”

This was, in fact, the Battle of Herrings, so called because the English defeated and cut off a French and Scottish force which attacked them as they were bringing herrings into camp for provisions in Lent.

Now the people of Vaucouleurs brought clothes for Joan to wear on her journey to the Dauphin. They were such clothes as men wear—doublet, hose, surcoat, boots, and spurs—and Robert de Baudricourt gave Joan a sword. Her reason was that she would have to be living alone among men-at-arms for a ten days’ journey, and she thought it was more modest to wear armor like the rest. Also, her favorite saint, St. Margaret, had done this once when in danger. Besides, in all the romances of chivalry, we find fair maidens fighting in arms like men or traveling dressed as pages.

In the end this man’s dress, which henceforth she always wore, proved the ruin of Joan. Her enemies, the English and the false French, made it one of their chief charges against her that she dressed, as they chose to say, immodestly.

On February 23, 1429, the gate of the little castle of Vaucouleurs was thrown open. Seven travelers rode out, among them two squires, Jean de Nouillompont and Bertrand de Poulengy, with their attendants, and Joan the Maid.

“Go, and let what will come of it come!” said Robert de Baudricourt.

He did not expect much to come of it. It was a long journey—they were eleven days on the road—and a dangerous. But Joan laughed at danger. “God will clear my path to the king, for to this end I was born.”

Often they rode by night, stopping at monasteries when they could. Sometimes they slept out under the sky. Though she was so young and so beautiful, with the happiness of her long desire in her eyes, and the glory of her future shining on her, these two young gentlemen never dreamed of paying their court to her, as in romances they do, for they regarded her “as if she had been an angel.” They were in awe of her, they said long afterward, and all the knights who had seen her said the same. Dunois and d’Aulon and the Duc d’Alencon all said that she was “a thing enskied and sainted.”

From Fierbois, Joan of Arc made some clerk write to the king that she was coming to help him and that she would know him among all his men. Probably it was here that she wrote to beg her parents pardon, and they forgave her, she says. Meanwhile, news reached the people then besieged in Orleans that a marvelous Maiden was riding to their rescue.

On March 6, Joan arrived in Chinon, where for two or three days the king’s advisers would not let him see her. At last they yielded, and she went straight up to him, and when he denied that he was the king, she told him that she knew well who he was.

“There is the king,” said Charles, pointing to a richly dressed noble.

“No, fair Sire. You are he!”

Joan stayed at Chinon in the house of a noble lady. The young Duc d’Alencon was on her side from the first. Great people came to see her and question her, but when she was alone, she wept and prayed. The king sent messengers to inquire about her at Domremy, but time was going on, and Orleans was not relieved.

Joan was weary of being asked questions. One day she went to Charles and said, “Gentle Dauphin, why do you delay to believe me? I tell you that God has taken pity on you and your people at the prayer of St. Louis and St. Charlemagne. And I will tell you, by your leave, something which will show you that you should believe me.” Then she told him secretly something which, as he related, none could know but God and himself.

What did Joan say to the king, and what was the sign? About this her enemies later examined her ten times. She told them from the very first that she would never let them know—that if they made her speak, what she spoke would not be the truth. At last she told them a kind of parable about an angel and a crown, which neither was nor was meant to be taken as true. It was the king’s secret, and Joan kept it.

The End, Part Four

Mad folk hear voices; starved nuns, living always with their thoughts bent on Heaven, women of feeble body, accustomed to faints and to fits, have heard voices and seen visions. Some of them have been very good women; none have been strong, good riders, skilled in arms, able to march all day long with little food, able to draw the arrow from their own wound and mount horse and charge again, like Joan of Arc.

In one respect, Joan’s conduct after these Voices and visions began was perhaps, as regarded herself, unfortunate. She did not speak of them to her parents, nor tell about them to the priest when she confessed. Her enemies were thus able to say, later, that they could not have been holy visions or Voices; otherwise she would not have concealed them from her father, her mother, and the priest, to whom she was bound to tell everything and from whom she should have sought advice.

Thus, long afterward, St. Theresa had visions, and in obedience to her priest, she at first distrusted these as perhaps a delusion of evil or a temptation of spiritual pride. Joan, however, was afraid that her father would interfere with her mission and prevent her from going to the king. She believed that she must not be “disobedient to the heavenly vision.”

In 1428 only a very few small towns in the east still held out for the Dauphin, and these were surrounded on every side by enemies. Meanwhile the Voices came more frequently, urging Joan to go into France and help her country. She asked how she, a girl, who could not ride or use sword and lance, could be of any help? Rather would she stay at home and spin beside her dear mother.

At the same time she was encouraged by one of the vague old prophecies which were common in France. A legend ran that France was to be saved by a Maiden from the Oak Wood, and there was an Oak Wood near Domremy. Some such prophecy had an influence on Joan and probably helped people to believe in her. The Voices often commanded her to go to Vaucouleurs, a neighboring town which was loyal, and there meet Robert de Baudricourt, who was captain of the French garrison.

Now, Robert de Baudricourt was not what is called a romantic person. Though little over thirty, he had already married two rich widows. He was a gallant soldier, but a plain practical man, very careful of his own interest and cunning enough to hold his own among his many enemies, English, Burgundian, and Lorrainers.

Joan had a cousin who was married to one Durand Lassois, at Burey en Vaux, a village near Vaucouleurs. This cousin invited Joan to visit her for a week. At the end of that time she spoke to her cousin’s husband. There was an old saying, as we saw, that France would be rescued by a Maid, and she, as she told Lassois, was that Maid. Lassois listened, and, whatever he may have thought of her chances, he led her to Robert de Baudricourt.

Joan came, in her simple red dress, and walked straight up to the captain among his men. She knew him, she said, by what her Voices had told her. She told him that the Dauphin must keep quiet and risk no battle, for before the middle of Lent next year, God would send him succor. She added that the kingdom belonged not to the Dauphin but to her Master, who willed that the Dauphin should be crowned, and she herself would lead him to Reims to be anointed with the holy oil.

“And who is your Master?” said Robert.

“The King of Heaven!”

Robert, very naturally, thought that Joan was crazed, and he shrugged his shoulders. He bluntly told Lassois to box her ears and take her back to her father. So she had to go home; but here new troubles awaited her. The enemy came down on Domremy and burned it; Joan and her family fled to Neufchateau, where they stayed for a few days.

When Joan looked from her father’s garden to the church, she saw nothing but a heap of smoking ruins. These things only made her feel more deeply the sorrows of her country. The time was drawing near when she had prophesied that the Dauphin was to receive help from Heaven—namely, in the Lent of 1429. On that year the season was held more than commonly sacred, for Good Friday and the Annunciation fell on the same day.

So, early in January, Joan turned her back on Domremy, which she was never to see again. Her cousin Lassois came and asked leave for Joan to visit him again; so she said goodbye to her father and mother and to her friends. She went to her cousin’s house at Burey, and there she stayed for six weeks, hearing bad news of the siege of Orleans by the English.

Meanwhile, Robert de Baudricourt, in Vaucouleurs, was not easy in his mind, for he was likely to lose the protection of Rene of Anjou, the Duc de Bar, who was on the point of joining the English. Thus Robert may have been more inclined to listen to Joan than when he bade her cousin box her ears and take her back to her father.

A squire named Jean de Nouillompont met Joan one day. “Well, my lass,” said he, “is our king to be driven from France, and are we all to become English?”

“I have come here,” said Joan, “to bid Robert de Baudricourt lead me to the king, but he will not listen to me. And yet to the king I must go, even if I walk my legs down to the knees, for none in all the world—king, nor duke, nor the King of Scotland’s daughter—can save France but myself only. Certainly, I would rather stay and spin with my poor mother, for to fight is not my calling, but I must go, and I must fight, for so my Lord will have it.”

“And who is your lord?” said Jean de Nouillompont.

“He is God,” said the Maiden.

“Then, so help me God, I shall take you to the king,” said Jean, putting her hands in his. “When do we start?”

“Today is better than tomorrow,” said the Maid.

The End, Part Three

All those who had seen Joan told the same tale: she was always kind, simple, industrious, pious and yet merry, and fond of playing with the others.

One of her friends, a girl called Mengette, whose cottage was next to that of Joan’s father, said, “Joan was so pious that we other children told her she was too good.”

In peaceful times Joan would have lived and married and died and been forgotten. But the times were evil. The two parties of Burgundy and Armagnac divided town from town and village from village. It was as in the days of the Douglas Wars in Scotland, when the very children took sides for Queen Mary and King James and fought each other in the streets.

Domremy was for the Armagnacs—that is, against the English and for the Dauphin, the son of the mad Charles VI. But at Maxey, a village near Domremy, the people were all for Burgundy and the English. The boys of Domremy would go out and fight the Maxey boys with fists and sticks and stones. Joan did not remember having taken part in those battles, but she had often seen her brothers and the Domremy boys come home all bruised and bleeding.

Once Joan saw more of war than these schoolboy bickers. It was in 1425, when she was a girl of thirteen. There was a kind of robber chief on the English side, a man named Henri d’Orly, from Savoy, who dwelt in the castle of Doulevant. There he and his band of armed men lived and drank and plundered far and near. One day there galloped into Domremy a squadron of spearmen, who rode through the fields driving together the cattle of the villagers, among them the cows of Joan’s father. The country people could make no resistance; they were glad enough if their houses were not burned.

So off rode Henri d’Orly’s men, driving the cattle with their spear points along the track to the castle of Doulevant. But cows are not fast travelers, and when the robbers had reached a little village called Dommartin le France they rested, going to the tavern to make merry. But by this time a lady, Madame d’Ogevillier, had sent in all haste to the Count de Vaudemont to tell him how the villagers of Domremy had been ruined. So he called his squire, Barthelemy de Clefmont, and bade him summon his spears and mount and ride.

Barthelemy de Clefmont, with seven or eight lances, galloped down the path to Dommartin le France. There they found the cattle, and d’Orly’s men fled like cowards. So Barthelemy with his comrades was returning very joyously when Henri d’Orly rode up with a troop of horse and followed hard after him. He was wounded by a lance, but he cut his way through d’Orly’s men and also brought the cattle back safely—a very gallant deed of arms.

Three years later there was an alarm, and the Domremy people fled to Neufchateau, Joan going with her parents. Afterward her enemies tried to prove that she had been a servant at an inn in Neufchateau, had lived roughly with grooms and soldiers, and had learned to ride. But this was absolutely untrue.

In 1424, when Joan was between twelve and thirteen, a wonderful thing befell her. A Voice spoke to her and prophesied of what she was to do.

She told the same story both to friends and foes; to the learned men who, by her king’s desire, examined her at Poitiers before she went to war, and to her deadly foes at Rouen. Unluckily the book that was kept of what she said at Poitiers is lost. Before her enemies at Rouen, there were many things which she did not think it right to say.

When the Voice first came, she was in great fear. And it came, that Voice, about noonday in the summer season, she being in her father’s garden. And Joan had not fasted the day before that, but she was fasting when the Voice came. And she heard the Voice on her right side, toward the church, and rarely did she hear it but she also saw a great light.

Her enemies asked her if she heard these Voices there, in the hall of judgment, and she answered, “If I were in a wood, I should well hear these Voices coming to me.”

The Voices at first only told her to “be a good girl and go to church.” She thought it was a holy Voice, and that it came from God, and the third time she heard it, she knew it was the voice of an angel. The Voice told her of “the great pitifulness there was in France” and said one day she must go into France and help the country.

She had visions with the Voices, visions first of St. Michael, and then of St. Catherine and St. Margaret. “I saw them with my bodily eyes, as I see you,” she said to her judges, “and when they departed from me I wept, and well I wished that they had taken me with them.”

What are we to think about these visions and these Voices which were with Joan to her death? Some have thought that she was mad; others that she only told the story to win a hearing and make herself important; or, again, that a trick was played on her to win her aid. The last idea is impossible. The French court did not want her.

The second idea, as everyone will admit who reads Joan’s answers and follows her step by step from childhood to victory, to captivity, to death, is also impossible. She was as truthful as she was brave and wise.

But was she partially insane? It is certain that mad people do hear voices which are not real and believe that they come to them from without. But these mad voices say mad things. Now, Joan’s Voices never said anything but what was wise beyond her own wisdom, and right, and true. She governed almost all her actions by their advice. When she disobeyed her counsel, as she called it, the result was evil, and once, as we shall see, it was ruinous.

The End, Part Two

To understand Joan’s history, it is necessary to say, first, how we come to know so much about one who died so many years ago, and next, to learn how her country chanced to be so wretched before Joan came to deliver it and to give her life for France. We know so much about her not from poets and writers of books who lived in her day, but because she was tried by French priests in 1431, and all her answers on everything that she ever did in all her life were written down in Latin. These answers fill most of a large volume.

Twenty years later, when the English had been driven out of France, the French king collected learned scholars, who examined witnesses from all parts of the country, men and women who had known Joan as a child, or in the wars, or in prison, and they heard her case again, and they destroyed the former unjust judgment. The answers of these witnesses fill two volumes, and thus we have all the Maid’s history, written during her life or not long after her death, and sworn to on oath.

We might expect that the evidence of her friends, after they had time to understand her, and perhaps were tempted to overpraise her, would show us a picture different from that given in the trial by her mortal enemies. But though the earlier account put forth by her foes reads like a description by the Scribes and Pharisees of the trial of Our Lord, yet the character of Joan was so noble that the versions by her friends and her enemies practically agree in her honor. Her advocates cannot make us admire her more than we must admire her in the answers which she gave to her accusers.

The records of these two trials, then, with letters and poems and histories written at the time, or very little later, give us all our information about Joan of Arc.

Next, as to the great pitifulness that was in France before Joan of Arc came to deliver her country, the causes of the misery are long to tell and not easy to remember. To put it shortly, in Joan’s childhood France was under a mad king, Charles VI, and was torn to pieces by two factions: the party of Burgundy and the party of Armagnac. The English took advantage of these disputes and overran the land. France was not so much one country, divided by parties, as a loose knot of states, small and great, with different interests, obeying greedy and selfish chiefs rather than the king.

Joan cared only for her country, not for a part of it. She fought not for Orleans, or Anjou, or Brittany, or Lorraine, but for France.

In fact, she made France a nation again. Before she appeared, everywhere was murder, revenge, robbery, burning of towns, slaughter of peaceful people, wretchedness, and despair. It was to redeem France from this ruin that Joan came in 1429, just when the English were besieging Orleans. Had they taken the strong city of Orleans, they could have overrun all southern and central France and would have driven the natural king of France, Charles the Dauphin, into exile. From this ruin Joan saved her country.

The English were besieging Orleans; Joan the Maid drove them from its walls. How did it happen that a girl of seventeen, who could neither read nor write, became the greatest general on the side of France? How did a woman defeat the hardy English soldiers who were used to chasing the French before them like sheep?

Joan’s parents were not indigent; they had lands and cattle, and a little money laid by in case of need. Her father was at one time doyen, or headman, of Domremy. Their house was hard by the church, in the part of the hamlet where the people were better off, and they had more freedom and privileges than many of their neighbors. They were devoted to the Royal House of France, which protected them from the tyranny of lords and earls further east. As they lived in a village under the patronage of St. Remigius, they were much interested in Reims, his town, where the kings of France were crowned and anointed with holy oil, which was believed to have been brought in a sacred bottle by an angel.

In the Middle Ages, the king was not regarded as really king till this holy oil had been poured on his head. Thus we shall see, later, how anxious Joan was that Charles VII, then the Dauphin, should be crowned and anointed in Reims, though it was still in the possession of the English.

Joan of Arc was brought up by her parents (as she told the judges at her trial) to be industrious, to sew and spin. She did not fear to match herself at spinning and sewing, she said, against any woman in Rouen. When very young, she sometimes went to the fields to watch the cattle. As she grew older, she worked in the house; she did not any longer watch sheep and cattle. But the times were dangerous, and when there was an alarm of soldiers or robbers in the neighborhood, she sometimes helped to drive the flock into a fortified island or peninsula for which her father was responsible in the river near her home.

She learned her creed, she said, from her mother. Twenty years after her death, her neighbors described her as she was when a child. Jean Morin said that she was a good, industrious girl but that she would often be praying in church when her father and mother did not know it. Jean Waterin, when he was a boy, had seen Joan in the fields, “and when they were all playing together, she would go apart and pray to God, and he and the others used to laugh at her. When she heard the church bell ring, she would kneel down in the fields.”

The End, Part One

The peril was, however, far from ended, for many of the Magyars had no notion of accepting an infant for their king. By Easter, the King of Poland was advancing upon Buda to claim the realm to which he had been invited. No one had discovered the extraction of the crown, and Elizabeth’s object was to take her child to Weissenburg and there have him crowned, so as to disconcert the Polish party.

She had sent to Buda for cloth of gold to make him a coronation dress, but it did not come in time. Helen therefore shut herself into the chapel at Komorn and, with doors fast bolted, cut up a rich and beautiful vestment of his grandfather’s, the emperor Sigismund, of red and gold with silver spots, and made it into a tiny coronation robe, with surplice and humeral (or shoulder piece), the stole and banner, the gloves and shoes.

The queen was much alarmed by a report that the Polish party meant to stop her on her way to Weissenburg, and if the baggage should be seized and searched, the discovery of the crown might have fatal consequences. Helen, on this, observed that the king was more important than the crown, and that the best way would be to keep them together, so she wrapped up the crown in a cloth and hid it under the mattress of his cradle, with a long spoon for mixing his pap upon the top. So, said the queen, he might take care of his crown himself.

On Tuesday before Whitsunday the party set out, escorted by Count Ulric and several other knights and nobles. After crossing the Danube in a large boat, the queen and her little girl were placed in a carriage, the other ladies rode, and the cradle and its precious contents were carried by four men. This the poor little Lassla, as Helen shortens his lengthy name, resented so much that he began to scream loudly, and she was forced to dismount and carry him in her arms, along a road rendered swampy by much rain.

They found all the villages deserted by the peasants, who had fled into the woods. As most of their lords were of the other party, they expected an attack, so the little king was put into the carriage with his mother and sister, and the ladies formed a circle round it, “that if anyone shot at the carriage we might receive the stroke.”

When the danger was over, the child was taken out again, for he would be content nowhere but in the arms of either his nurse or of faithful Helen, who took turns carrying him on foot nearly all the way, sometimes in a high wind which covered them with dust, sometimes in great heat, sometimes in rain so heavy that Helen’s fur pelisse, with which she covered his cradle, had to be wrung out several times. They slept at an inn, round which the gentlemen lighted a circle of fires, and kept watch all night.

Weissenburg was loyal; five hundred armed gentlemen came out to meet them, and on Whitsun Eve they entered the city, Helen carrying her little king in her arms in the midst of a circle of these five hundred holding their naked swords aloft. On Whitsunday, Helen rose early, bathed the little fellow, who was twelve weeks old that day, and dressed him. He was then carried in her arms to the church, beside his mother. According to the old Hungarian customs, the choir door was closed—the burghers were within and would not open till the new monarch should have taken the great coronation oath to respect the Hungarian liberties and laws.

This oath was taken by the queen in the name of her son, the doors were opened, and all the train entered, the little princess being lifted up to stand by the organ lest she should be hurt in the throng. First, Helen held her charge up to be confirmed, and then she had to hold him while he was knighted with a richly adorned sword bearing the motto “Indestructible” by a stout Hungarian knight called Mikosch Weida, who struck with such a goodwill that Helen felt the blow on her arm, and the queen cried out to him not to hurt the child.

The Archbishop of Gran anointed the little creature, dressed him in the red and gold robe, and put on his head the holy crown. The people admired to see how straight he held up his neck under it; indeed, they admired the loudness and strength of his cries when, as the good lady records, “the noble king had little pleasure in his coronation, for he wept aloud.” She had to hold him up for the rest of the service, while Count Ulric of Eily held the crown over his head, and afterward to seat him in a chair in St. Peter’s Church, and then he was carried home in his cradle, with the count holding the crown over his head and the other regalia borne before him.

Thus Ladislas became King of Hungary at twelve weeks old and was then carried off by his mother into Austria for safety. Whether this secret robbery of the crown and coronation by stealth was wise or just on the mother’s part is a question not easy of answer—though of course she deemed it her duty to do her utmost for her child’s rights. Of Helen Kottenner’s deep fidelity and conscientious feeling there can be no doubt, and her having acted with her eyes fully open to the risk she ran, her trust in Heaven overcoming her fears and terrors, rendered her truly a heroine.

The crown has had many other adventures, and afterward it was kept in an apartment of its own, in the castle of Ofen, with an antechamber guarded by two grenadiers. The door was of iron, with three locks, and the crown itself was contained in an iron chest with five seals. All this, however, did not prevent it from being taken away and lost in the Revolution of 1849.

The End

It was early spring, and snow was still on the ground, and the Lady of Kottenner and her faithful nameless assistant traveled in a sledge, but two Hungarian noblemen went with them, and they had to be most careful in concealing their arrangements. Helen had with her the queen’s signet and keys, and her friend had a file in each shoe and keys under his black velvet dress.

On arriving in the evening, they found that the Burggraf had fallen ill, and he could not sleep in the chamber leading to the vault because it belonged to the ladies’ chambers, and that he had therefore put a cloth over the padlock of the door and sealed it. There was a stove in the room, and the maidens began to pack up their clothes there, an operation that lasted till eight o’clock, while Helen’s friend stood there, talking and jesting with them, trying all the while to hide the files, and contriving to say to Helen, “Take care that we have a light.”

So she begged the old housekeeper to give her plenty of wax tapers, as she had many prayers to say. At last everyone was gone to bed, and there only remained in the room with Helen an old woman whom she had brought with her who knew no German and was fast asleep. Then the accomplice came back through the chapel, which opened into this same hall. He had on his black velvet gown and felt shoes and was followed by a servant who, Helen says, was bound to him by oath and had the same Christian name as himself, this being evidently an additional bond of fidelity.

Helen, who had received from the queen all the keys to this outer room, let them in, and after the Burggraf’s cloth and seal had been removed, they unlocked the padlock and the other two locks of the outer door of the vault, and the two men descended into it. There were several other doors whose chains required to be filed through and their seals and locks broken, and to the ears of the waiting Helen, the noise appeared fatally loud.

She says, “I devoutly prayed to God and the Holy Virgin that they would support and help me, yet I was in greater anxiety for my soul than for my life, and I prayed to God that He would be merciful to my soul and rather let me die at once there than that anything should happen against his will or that should bring misfortune on my country and people.”

She fancied she heard a noise of armed men at the chapel door, but finding nothing there, she believed that it was a spirit, and returning to her prayers, she vowed to make a pilgrimage to St. Maria Zell in Styria if the Holy Virgin’s intercessions obtained their success and, till the pilgrimage could be made, “to forego every Saturday night my feather bed!”

After another false alarm at a supposed noise at the maiden’s door, she ventured into the vault to see how her companions were getting on, and she found they had filed away all the locks except that of the case containing the crown. This they were obliged to burn in spite of their apprehension that the smell and smoke might be observed.

They then shut up the chest, replaced the padlocks and chains with those they had brought for the purpose, and renewed the seals with the queen’s signet, which, bearing the royal arms, would baffle detection that the seals had been tampered with. They then took the crown into the chapel, where they found a red velvet cushion so large that by taking out some of the stuffing, a hiding place was made in which the crown was deposited and the cushion sewn up over it.

By this time day was dawning, the maidens were dressing, and it was the hour for setting off for Komorn. The old woman who had waited on them came to the Lady of Kottenner to have her wages paid and be dismissed to Buda. While she was waiting, she began to remark on a strange thing lying by the stove. To the Lady Helen’s great dismay, she perceived to be a bit of the case in which the crown was kept. She tried to prevent the old woman from noticing it, pushed it into the hottest part of the stove, and by way of further precaution, took the old woman away with her on the plea of asking the queen to make her a bedeswoman at Vienna, and this was granted to her.

When all was ready, the gentleman desired his servant to take the cushion and put it into the sledge designed for himself and the Lady of Kottenner. The man took it on his shoulders, hiding it under an old ox-hide with the tail hanging down, to the laughter of all beholders. Helen further records the trying to get some breakfast in the marketplace and finding nothing but herrings, also the going to mass, and the care she took not to sit upon the holy crown, though she had to sit on its cushion in the sledge.

They dined at an inn, but took care to keep the cushion in sight, and then in the dusk crossed the Danube on the ice, which was becoming very thin. Halfway across, it broke under the maidens’ carriage, so that Helen expected to be lost in the Danube, crown and all. Though many packages were lost under the ice, her sledge got safely over, as well as all the ladies, some of whom she took into her conveyance, and all safely arrived at the castle of Komorn late in the evening.

The very hour of their arrival a babe was born to the queen, and to her exceeding joy, it was a son. Count von Eily, hearing “that a king and friend was born to him,” had bonfires lighted, and a torchlight procession on the ice that same night, and early in the morning came the Archbishop of Gran to christen the child.

The queen wished her faithful Helen to be godmother, but she refused in favor of some lady whose family it was probably needful to propitiate. She took off the little princess Elizabeth’s mourning for her father and dressed her in red and gold. All the maidens appeared in gay apparel, and there was great rejoicing and thanksgiving when the babe was christened Ladislas, after a sainted King of Hungary.

The End, Part Two

A crown and a cross were given to him for his coronation, which took place in the Church of the Holy Virgin at Alba Regale, also called in German Weissenburg, where thenceforth the Kings of Hungary were anointed to begin their troubled reigns, and at the close of them were laid to rest beneath the pavement, where most of them might have used the same epitaph as the old Italian leader, “He rests here, who never rested before.”

For it was a wild realm, bordered on all sides by foes, with Poland, Bohemia, and Austria ever casting greedy eyes upon it, and afterward with the Turk upon the southern border, while the Magyars, the Hungarian nobles, themselves were a fierce and untamable race, bold and generous but brooking little control, claiming a voice in choosing their own Sovereign and resisting him, even by force of arms, if he broke the laws. No prince had a right to their allegiance unless he had been crowned with St. Stephen’s Crown, but if he had once worn that sacred circle, he thenceforth was held as the only lawful monarch, unless he should flagrantly violate the Constitution.

In 1076, another crown had been given by the Greek emperor to Geysa, King of Hungary, and the sacred crown combined the two. It had the two arches of the Roman crown and the gold circlet of the Constantinopolitan; the difference of workmanship was evident.

In the year 1439 died King Albert, who had been appointed King of Hungary in right of his wife, Queen Elizabeth. He left a little daughter only four years old, and as the Magyars had never been governed by a female hand, they proposed to send and offer their crown, and the hand of their young widowed queen, to Wladislas, the King of Poland. But Elizabeth had hopes of another child, and in case it should be a son, she had no mind to give away its rights to its father’s throne.

How, then, was she to help herself among the proud and determined nobles of her court? One thing was certain, that if once the Polish king were crowned with St. Stephen’s crown, it would be his own fault if he were not King of Hungary as long as he lived. But if the crown were not to be found, of course he could not receive it, and the fealty of the nobles would not be pledged to him.

The most trustworthy person she had about her was Helen Kottenner, the lady who had the charge of her little daughter, Princess Elizabeth, and to her she confided her desire that the crown might be secured so as to prevent the Polish party from getting access to it. Helen herself has written down the history of these strange events, and of her own struggles of mind at the risk she ran, and the doubt whether good would come of the intrigue. There can be no doubt that, whether the queen’s conduct were praiseworthy or not, Helen dared a great peril for the sake purely of loyalty and fidelity.

“The queen’s commands,” she says, “sorely troubled me, for it was a dangerous venture for me and my little children, and I turned it over in my mind what I should do, for I had no one to take counsel of but God alone. I thought if I did it not and evil arose therefrom, I should be guilty before God and the world. So I consented to risk my life on this difficult undertaking, but I desired to have someone to help me.”

This was permitted, but the first person to whom the Lady of Kottenner confided her intention, a Croat, lost his color from alarm, looked like one half-dead, and went at once in search of his horse. The next thing that was heard of him was that he had had a bad fall from his horse and had been obliged to return to Croatia, and the queen remained much alarmed at her plans being known to one so faint-hearted. A more courageous confidant, however, was afterward found in a Hungarian gentleman, whose name has become illegible in Helen’s old manuscript.

The crown was in the vaults of the strong Castle of Plintenburg, also called Vissegrad, which stands upon a bend of the Danube about twelve miles from the twin cities of Buda and Pest. It was in a case within a chest, sealed with many seals, and after the king’s death it had been brought up by the nobles who closely guarded both it and the queen into her apartments, where it was examined and replaced in the chest.

The next night, one of the queen’s ladies upset a wax taper without being aware of it, and before the fire was discovered and put out, the corner of the chest was singed and a hole burned in the blue velvet cushion that lay on the top. Upon this, the lords had caused the chest to be taken down again into the vault and had fastened the doors with many locks and with seals. The castle had further been put into the charge of Ladislas von Gara, the queen’s cousin, who was Ban, or hereditary commander, of the border troops, and he had given it over to a Burggraf, or seneschal, who had placed his bed in the chamber where was the door leading to the vaults.

The queen removed to Komorn, a castle higher up the Danube, in charge of her faithful cousin, Count Ulric of Eily, taking with her her little daughter Elizabeth, Helen Kottenner, and two other ladies. This was the first stage on the journey to Presburg, where the nobles had wished to lodge the queen, and from thence she sent back Helen to bring the rest of the maids of honor and her goods to join her at Komorn.

The End, Part One

In this he appears to have acted unjustly, from the strong desire to avail himself by any pretext of an opportunity of breaking the overweening power of the great turbulent nobles. To make up for the loss, he created the new earldom of Menteith for the young Malise Graham, the son of the dispossessed earl.

But the proud and vindictive Grahams were not thus to he pacified. Sir Robert Graham, the uncle of the young earl, drew off into the Highlands and there formed a conspiracy among other discontented men who hated the resolute government that repressed their violence. Men of princely blood joined in the plot, and 300 Highland catherans were ready to accompany the expedition that promised the delights of war and plunder.

Even when the hard-worked king was setting forth to enjoy his holiday at Perth, the traitors had fixed upon that spot as the place of his doom. But the scheme was known to so many that it could not be kept entirely secret, and warnings began to gather round the king.

When, on his way to Perth, he was about to cross the Firth of Forth, the wild figure of a Highland woman appeared at his bridle rein and solemnly warned him that “if he crossed that water, he would never return alive.” He was struck by the apparition, and he bade one of his knights to inquire of her what she meant, but the knight must have been a dullard or a traitor, for he told the king that the woman was either mad or drunk, and no notice was taken of her warning.

There was likewise a saying abroad in Scotland that the new year, 1436, should see the death of a king. This same carnival night, James, while playing at chess with a young friend, whom he was wont to call the king of love, laughingly observed that “it must be you or I since there are but two kings in Scotland—therefore, look well to yourself.”

Little did the blithe monarch guess that at that moment one of the conspirators, touched by a moment’s misgiving, was hovering round, seeking in vain for an opportunity of giving him warning; that even then his chamberlain and kinsman, Sir Robert Stewart, was enabling the traitors to place boards across the moat for their passage and to remove the bolts and bars of all the doors in their way. And the Highland woman was at the door, earnestly entreating to see the king if but for one moment! The message was even brought to him, but alas! He bade her wait till the morrow, and she turned away, declaring that she should never more see his face!

And now, as before said, the feast was over, and the king stood, gaily chatting with his wife and her ladies, when the clang of arms was heard, and the glare of torches in the court below flashed on the windows. The ladies flew to secure the doors. Alas! The bolts and bars were gone! Too late the warnings returned upon the king’s mind, and he knew it was he alone who was sought. He tried to escape by the windows, but here the bars were but too firm. Then he seized the tongs and tore up a board in the floor, by which he let himself down into the vault below, just as the murderers came rushing along the passage, slaying on their way a page named Walter Straiton.

There was no bar to the door. Yes, there was. Catherine Douglas, worthy of her name, worthy of the cognizance of the bleeding heart, thrust her arm through the empty staples to gain for her sovereign a few moments more for escape and safety! But though true as steel, the brave arm was not as strong. It was quickly broken. She was thrust fainting aside, and the ruffians rushed in.

Queen Joan stood in the midst of the room, with her hair streaming round her and her mantle thrown hastily on. Some of the wretches even struck and wounded her, but Graham called them off and bade them search for the king. They sought him in vain in every corner of the women’s apartments and dispersed through the other rooms in search of their prey.

The ladies began to hope that the citizens and nobles in the town were coming to their help and that the king might have escaped through an opening that led from the vault into the tennis court. Presently, however, the king called to them to draw him up again, for he had not been able to get out of the vault, having a few days before caused the hole to be bricked up because his tennis balls used to fly into it and be lost. In trying to draw him up by the sheets, Elizabeth Douglas, another of the ladies, was actually pulled down into the vault. The noise was heard by the assassins, who were still watching outside, and they returned.

There is no need to tell of the foul and cruel slaughter that ensued, nor of the barbarous vengeance that visited it. If we have turned our eyes for a moment to the Bloody Carnival of Perth, it is for the sake of the king who was too upright for his bloodthirsty subjects and above all for that of the noble-hearted lady whose frail arm was the guardian of her sovereign’s life in the extremity of peril.

The End

Thus it was that Christmas and Carnival time of 1435–6 had been spent by the court in the cloisters of Perth, and the dance, the song, and the tourney had strangely contrasted with the grave and self-denying habits to which the Dominicans were devoted in their neighboring cells. The festive season was nearly at an end, for it was the 20th of February, but the evening had been more than usually gay and had been spent in games at chess, tables, or backgammon, reading romances of chivalry, harping, and singing.

King James himself, brave, handsome, and in the prime of life, was the blithest of the whole joyous party. He was the most accomplished man in his dominions, for though he had been basely kept a prisoner at Windsor throughout his boyhood by Henry IV of England, an education had been bestowed on him far above what he would have otherwise obtained, and he was naturally a man of great ability, refinement, and strength of character. Not only was he a perfect knight on horseback, but in wrestling and running, throwing the hammer, and “putting the stane” he had scarcely a rival. He was skilled in all the learned lore of the time, wrote poetry, composed music both sacred and profane, and was a complete minstrel, able to sing beautifully and to play on the harp and organ.

His queen, the beautiful Joan Beaufort, had been the lady of his minstrelsy in the days of his captivity, ever since he had watched her walking on the slopes of Windsor Park and wooed her in verses that are still preserved. They had now been eleven years married, and their court was one bright spot of civilization, refinement, and grace amid the savagery of Scotland.

And now, after the pleasant social evening, the queen, with her long fair hair unbound, was sitting under the hands of her tire-women, who were preparing her for the nights rest. The king, in his furred nightgown, was standing before the bright fire on the hearth of the wide chimney, laughing and talking with the attendant ladies.

Yet dark hints had already been whispered which might have cast a shadow over that careless mirth. Always fierce and vindictive, the Scots had been growing more and more lawless and savage ever since the disputed succession of Bruce and Balliol had unsettled all royal authority and led to one perpetual war with the English.

The twenty years of James’s captivity had been the worst of all—almost every noble was a robber chief; Scottish Borderer preyed upon English Borderer, Highlander upon Lowlander, knight upon traveler, everyone who had armor upon him who had not; each clan was at deadly feud with its neighbor; blood was shed like water from end to end of the miserable land, and the higher the birth of the offender, the greater the impunity he claimed.

Indeed, James himself had been brought next to the throne by one of the most savage and horrible murders ever perpetrated—that of his elder brother, David, by his own uncle. He himself had probably been only saved from sharing the like fate by being sent out of the kingdom. His earnest words on his return to take the rule of this unhappy realm were these: “Let God but grant me life, and there shall not be a spot in my realm where the key shall not keep the castle, and the bracken bush the cow, though I should lead the life of a dog to accomplish it.”

This great purpose had been before James through the eleven years of his reign, and he had worked it out resolutely. The lawless nobles would not brook his ruling hand, and strong and bitter was the hatred that had arisen against him. In many of his transactions he was far from blameless: he was sometimes tempted to craft, sometimes to tyranny, but his object was always a high and kingly one, though he was led by the horrid wickedness of the men he had to deal with more than once to forget that evil is not to be overcome with evil but with good.

In the main, it was his high and uncompromising resolution to enforce the laws upon high and low alike that led to the nobles’ conspiracies against him. If he had always been true to his purpose of swerving neither to the right nor to the left, though, he might have avoided the last fatal offense that armed the murderer against his life.

The chief misdoers in the long period of anarchy had been his uncles and cousins, nor was it till after his eldest uncle’s death that his return home had been possible. With a strong hand had he avenged upon the princes and their followers the many miseries they had inflicted upon his people, and in carrying out these measures, he had seized upon the great earldom of Strathern, which had descended to one of their party in right of his wife, declaring that it could not be inherited by a female.

The End, Part One

Then a voice was heard, that of the richest burgher in the town, Eustache de St. Pierre. “Messieurs high and low,” he said, “it would be a sad pity to suffer so many people to die through hunger if it could be prevented. To hinder it would be meritorious in the eyes of our Savior. I have such faith and trust in finding grace before God, if I die to save my townsmen, that I name myself as the first of the six.”

As the burgher ceased, his fellow townsmen wept aloud, and many, amid tears and groans, threw themselves at his feet in a transport of grief and gratitude. Another citizen, very rich and respected, rose up and said, “I will be second to my comrade, Eustache.” His name was Jean Daire. After him, Jacques Wissant, another very rich man, offered himself as companion to these, who were both his cousins, and his brother Pierre would not be left behind, and two more, unnamed, made up this gallant band of men willing to offer their lives for the rescue of their fellow townsmen.

Sir Jean de Vienne mounted a little horse—for he had been wounded, and was still lame—and came to the gate with them, followed by all the people of the town, weeping and wailing, yet for their own sakes and their children’s not daring to prevent the sacrifice. The gates were opened, the governor and the six passed out, and the gates were again shut behind them. Sir Jean then rode up to Sir Walter Mauny and told him how these burghers had voluntarily offered themselves, begging him to do all in his power to save them, and Sir Walter promised with his whole heart to plead their cause.

De Vienne then went back into the town, full of heaviness and anxiety. The six citizens were led by Sir Walter to the presence of the king, in his full court. They all knelt down, and the foremost said, “Most gallant King, you see before you six burghers of Calais, who have all been capital merchants, and who bring you the keys of the castle and town. We yield ourselves to your absolute will and pleasure in order to save the remainder of the inhabitants of Calais, who have suffered much distress and misery. Condescend, therefore, out of your nobleness of mind, to have pity on us.”

Strong emotion was excited among all the barons and knights who stood round as they saw the resigned countenances, pale and thin with patiently endured hunger, of these venerable men, offering themselves in the cause of their fellow townsmen. Many tears of pity were shed, but the king still showed himself implacable, and he commanded that they should be led away and their heads stricken off.

Sir Walter Mauny interceded for them with all his might, even telling the king that such an execution would tarnish his honor, and that reprisals would be made on his own garrisons, and all the nobles joined in entreating pardon for the citizens, but still without effect. The headsman had been sent for when Queen Philippa, her eyes streaming with tears, threw herself on her knees amongst the captives and said, “Ah, gentle sir, since I have crossed the sea, with much danger, to see you, I have never asked you one favor. Now I beg as a boon to myself, for the sake of the Son of the Blessed Mary, and for your love to me, that you will be merciful to these men!”

For some time the king looked at her in silence. Then he exclaimed, “Dame, dame, would that you had been anywhere than here! You have entreated in such a manner that I cannot refuse you. I therefore give these men to you, to do as you please with.”

Joyfully did Queen Philippa conduct the six citizens to her own apartments, where she made them welcome, sent them new garments, entertained them with a plentiful dinner, and dismissed them each with a gift of six nobles. After this, Sir Walter Mauny entered the city and took possession of it, retaining Sir Jean de Vienne and the other knights and squires till they should ransom themselves, and sending out the old French inhabitants. For the king was resolved to people the city entirely of English in order to gain a thoroughly strong hold of this first step in France.

The king and queen took up their abode in the city, and the houses of Jean Daire were, it appears, granted to the queen—perhaps because she considered the man himself as her charge and wished to secure them for him—and her little daughter Margaret was, shortly after, born in one of his houses. Eustache de St. Pierre was taken into high favor and placed in charge of the new citizens whom the king placed in the city.

The End

So, though King Edward’s daughter Isabel was a beautiful fair-haired girl of fifteen, the young count would scarcely look at her. In the last week before the marriage day, while her robes and her jewels were being prepared, and her father and mother were arranging the presents they should make to all their court on the wedding day, the bridegroom, when out hawking, gave his attendants the slip and galloped off to Paris, where he was welcomed by King Philippe.

This made Edward very wrathful, and he was more than ever determined to take Calais. About Whitsuntide he completed a great wooden castle upon the seashore and placed in it numerous warlike engines, with forty men-at-arms and 200 archers, who kept such a watch upon the harbor that not even the two Abbeville sailors could enter it without having their boats crushed and sunk by the great stones that the mangonels launched upon them. The townspeople began to feel what hunger really was, but their spirits were kept up by the hope that their king was at last collecting an army for their rescue.

And Philippe did collect all his forces, a great and noble army, and came one night to the hill of Sangate, just behind the English army. The knights’ armor glancing and their pennons flying in the moonlight were a beautiful sight to the hungry garrison who could see the white tents pitched upon the hillside.

Still there were but two roads by which the French could reach their friends in the town—one along the seacoast, the other by a marshy road higher up the country—and there was but one bridge by which the river could be crossed. The English king’s fleet could prevent any troops from passing along the coast road, the Earl of Derby guarded the bridge, and there was a great tower, strongly fortified, close upon Calais. There were a few skirmishes, but the French king, finding it difficult to force his way to relieve the town, sent a party of knights with a challenge to King Edward to come out of his camp and do battle upon a fair field.

To this Edward made answer: that he had been nearly a year before Calais, and had spent large sums of money on the siege, and that he had nearly become master of the place, so that he had no intention of coming out only to gratify his adversary, who must try some other road if he could not make his way in by that before him.

Three days were spent in parleys, and then, without the slightest effort to rescue the brave, patient men within the town, away went King Philippe of France with all his men, and the garrison saw the host that had crowded the hill of Sangate melt away like a summer cloud.

August had come again, and they had suffered privation for a whole year for the sake of the king who deserted them at their utmost need. They were in so grievous a state of hunger and distress that the hardiest could endure no more, for ever since Whitsuntide no fresh provisions had reached them. The governor, therefore, went to the battlements and made signs that he wished to hold a parley, and the king appointed Lord Basset and Sir Walter Mauny to meet him and appoint the terms of surrender.

The governor owned that the garrison was reduced to the greatest extremity of distress, and he requested that the king would be contented with obtaining the city and fortress, leaving the soldiers and inhabitants to depart in peace.

But Sir Walter Mauny was forced to make answer that the king, his lord, was so much enraged at the delay and expense that Calais had cost him that he would only consent to receive the whole on unconditional terms, leaving him free to slay, or to ransom, or make prisoners whomsoever he pleased, and he was known to consider that there was a heavy reckoning to pay, both for the trouble the siege had cost him and the damage the Calesians had previously done to his ships.

The brave answer was, “These conditions are too hard for us. We are but a small number of knights and squires, who have loyally served our lord and master as you would have done and have suffered much ill and disquiet, but we will endure far more than any man has done in such a post before we consent that the smallest boy in the town shall fare worse than ourselves. I therefore entreat you, for pity’s sake, to return to the king and beg him to have compassion, for I have such an opinion of his gallantry that I think he will alter his mind.”

The king’s mind, however, seemed sternly made up. All that Sir Walter Mauny and the barons of the council could obtain from him was that he would pardon the garrison and townsmen on condition that six of the chief citizens should present themselves to him, coming forth with bare feet and heads, with halters round their necks, carrying the keys of the town, and becoming absolutely his own to punish for their obstinacy as he should think fit.

On hearing this reply, Sir Jean de Vienne begged Sir Walter Mauny to wait till he could consult the citizens, and repairing to the marketplace, he caused a great bell to be rung, at the sound of which all the inhabitants came together in the town hall. When he told them of these hard terms he could not refrain from weeping bitterly, and wailing and lamentation arose all round him. Should all starve together, or sacrifice their best and most honored after all suffering in common so long?

The End, Part Three

After a time, in front of the tents, the English were to be seen hard at work with beams and boards, setting up huts for themselves and thatching them over with straw or broom. These wooden houses were all ranged in regular streets, and there was a marketplace in the midst whither every Saturday came farmers and butchers to sell corn and meat and hay for the horses. And the English merchants and Flemish weavers would come by sea and by land to bring cloth, bread, weapons, and everything that could be needed to be sold in this warlike market.

The governor, Sir Jean de Vienne, began to perceive that the king did not mean to waste his men by making vain attacks on the strong walls of Calais but to shut up the entrance by land and watch the coast by sea so as to prevent any provisions from being taken in and so to starve him into surrendering. Sir Jean de Vienne, however, hoped that before he should be entirely reduced by famine, the King of France would be able to get together another army and come to his relief, and at any rate he was determined to do his duty and hold out for his master to the last.

But as food was already beginning to grow scarce, he was obliged to turn out such persons as could not fight and had no stores of their own, and so one Wednesday morning he caused all the poor to be brought together—men, women, and children—and sent them all out of the town, to the number of 1,700. It was probably the truest mercy, for he had no food to give them, and they could only have starved miserably within the town or have hindered him from saving it for his sovereign, but to them it was dreadful to be driven out of house and home, straight down upon the enemy, and they went along weeping and wailing till the English soldiers met them and asked why they had come out.

They answered that they had been put out because they had nothing to eat, and their sorrowful, famished looks gained pity for them. King Edward sent orders that not only should they go safely through his camp, but that they should all rest and have the first hearty dinner that they had eaten for many a day, and he sent everyone a small sum of money before they left the camp, so that many of them went on their way praying aloud for the enemy who had been so kind to them.

A great deal happened while King Edward kept watch in his wooden town and the citizens of Calais guarded their walls. England was invaded by King David II of Scotland with a great army; the good Queen Philippa, who was left to govern at home in the name of her little son Lionel, assembled all the forces that were left at home and crossed the Straits of Dover, and a messenger brought King Edward letters from his queen to say that the Scots army had been entirely defeated at Nevil’s Cross, near Durham—that their king was a prisoner but that he had been taken by a squire named John Copeland, who would not give him up to her.

King Edward sent letters to John Copeland to come to him at Calais, and when the squire had made his journey, the king took him by the hand saying, “Ha! Welcome, my squire, who by his valor has captured our adversary the King of Scotland.”

Copeland, falling on one knee, replied, “If God, out of His great kindness, has given me the King of Scotland, no one ought to be jealous of it, for God can, when He pleases, send His grace to a poor squire as well as to a great lord. Sire, do not take it amiss if I did not surrender him to the orders of my lady the queen, for I hold my lands of you, and my oath is to you, not to her.”

The king was not displeased with his squire’s sturdiness but made him a knight, gave him a pension of £500 a year, and desired him to surrender his prisoner to the queen, as his own representative. This was accordingly done, and King David was lodged in the Tower of London.

Soon after, three days before All Saint’s Day, there was a large and gay fleet to be seen crossing from the white cliffs of Dover, and the king, his son, and his knights rode down to the landing place to welcome plump, fair-haired Queen Philippa and all her train of ladies, who had come in great numbers to visit their husbands, fathers, or brothers in the wooden town. Then there was a great court, and numerous feasts and dances, and the knights and squires were constantly striving who could do the bravest deed of prowess to please the ladies.

The King of France had placed numerous knights and men-at-arms in the neighboring towns and castles, and there were constant fights whenever the English went out foraging, and many bold deeds that were much admired were done. The great point was to keep provisions out of the town, and there was much fighting between the French who tried to bring in supplies and the English who intercepted them.

Very little was brought in by land, and Sir Jean de Vienne and his garrison would have been quite starved but for two sailors of Abbeville, named Marant and Mestriel, who knew the coast thoroughly, and often, in the dark autumn evenings, would guide in a whole fleet of little boats, loaded with bread and meat for the starving men within the city. They were often chased by King Edward’s vessels, and were sometimes very nearly taken, but they always managed to escape, and thus they still enabled the garrison to hold out.

The End, Part Two

Thus it was that when, in 1346, Edward III had beaten Philippe VI at the battle of Crecy, the first use he made of his victory was to march upon Calais and lay siege to it. The walls were exceedingly strong and solid; mighty defenses of masonry of huge thickness, like rocks for solidity, guarded it, and the king knew that it would be useless to attempt a direct assault.

Indeed, during all the Middle Ages, the modes of protecting fortifications were far more efficient than the modes of attacking them. The walls could be made enormously massive, the towers raised to a great height, and the defenders so completely sheltered by battlements that they could not easily be injured and could take aim from the tops of their turrets or from their loophole windows. The gates had absolute little castles of their own; a moat flowed round the walls full of water, only capable of being crossed by a drawbridge, behind which the portcullis, a grating armed beneath with spikes, was always ready to drop from the archway of the gate and close up the entrance. The only chance of taking a fortress by direct attack was to fill up the moat with earth and faggots and then raise ladders against the walls, or else to drive engines against the defenses: battering-rams which struck them with heavy beams, mangonels which launched stones, sows whose arched wooden backs protected troops of workmen who tried to undermine the wall, and moving towers consisting of a succession of stages or shelves, filled with soldiers, and with a bridge with iron hooks, capable of being launched from the highest story to the top of the battlements.

The besieged could generally disconcert the battering-ram by hanging beds or mattresses over the walls to receive the brunt of the blow, the sows could be crushed with heavy stones, the towers burned by well-directed flaming missiles, the ladders overthrown, and in general the besiegers suffered a great deal more damage than they could inflict. Cannon had indeed just been brought into use at the battle of Crecy, but they only consisted of iron bars fastened together with hoops and were as yet of little use, and thus there seemed to be little danger to a well-guarded city from any enemy outside the walls.

King Edward arrived before the place with all his victorious army early in August: his good knights and squires arrayed in glittering steel armor, covered with surcoats richly embroidered with their heraldic bearings; his stout men-at-arms, each of whom was attended by three bold followers; and his archers, with their crossbows to shoot bolts and longbows to shoot arrows of a yard long—it used to be said that each went into battle with three men’s lives under his girdle, namely, the three arrows he kept there ready to his hand. With the king was his son, Edward, the Prince of Wales, who had just won the golden spurs of knighthood so gallantly at Crecy when only in his seventeenth year, and likewise the famous Hainault knight, Sir Walter Mauny, and all that was noblest and bravest in England.

This whole glittering army, with the king’s great royal standard at their head, bearing the golden lilies of France quartered with the lions of England, and each troop guided by the square banner, swallow-tailed pennon, or pointed pennoncel of their leader, came marching to the gates of Calais, above which floated the blue standard of France with its golden flowers and with it the banner of the governor, Sir Jean de Vienne.

A herald in a rich, long robe embroidered with the arms of England rode up to the gate, a trumpet sounding before him, and called upon Sir Jean de Vienne to give up the place to Edward, King of England and of France, as he claimed to be. Sir Jean made answer that he held the town for Philippe, King of France, and that he would defend it to the last. The herald rode back again, and the English began the siege of the city.

At first they only encamped, and the people of Calais must have seen the whole plain covered with the white canvas tents, marshaled round the ensigns of the leaders, and here and there a more gorgeous one displaying the colors of the owner. Still there was no attack upon the walls.

The warriors were to be seen walking about in the leathern suits they wore under their armor. If a party was to be seen with their coats of mail on, helmet on head, and lance in hand, it was not against Calais that they came; they rode out into the country, and by and by might be seen driving back before them herds of cattle and flocks of sheep or pigs that they had seized and taken away from the poor peasants. At night the sky would show red lights where farms and homesteads had been set on fire.

The End, Part One

King Jean himself led the van, moving down through a defile into which, after a time, his whole army found themselves crowded. Meantime, the Prince of Wales had planted his army just where he would tempt Jean into that trap and had set his archers in good position. These men were clad in green, like Robin Hood’s men, and carried bows seven feet long and so thick that few men of modern days could bend them. A cloth-yard shaft from one of these would fly with tremendous force. Edward had placed these archers in ambush, behind green hedges and crouching in the green of the vineyards.

Just as the French king dashed down the narrow valley, with all his new chivalry around him—the white standard of France on one side of him, his keen-eyed little son on the other—and began to deploy the whole advance battalion preliminary to a grand charge, from both sides came arrows as thick as hail and as terrible as javelins from the hidden archers.

The astonished Frenchmen fell back. That crowded still more those who were yet wedged in the narrow space behind. Now came the English onset. Then a panic. Then a rout. Then a general flight.

Dukes, barons, and knights of all sorts fled with the rest; also Charles, Louis, and Jean, the three elder sons of the king. The king was in great danger of being slain, but he did not move, and Philippe stood fighting by his side. The standard-bearer fell, and the white ensign lay in the dust. Many a faithful knight was cut down or swept away a prisoner. But Philippe flinched not.

The assailants—some of whom knew the king, while others were wondering who he might be—pressed them fiercely on every side, striking at them, but more anxious to take them captives than to kill them, for they were worth a heavy ransom. The Englishmen shouted all together, “Yield you! Yield you, else you die!”

Little Sir Philippe had no yield in him as long as his father held out. He kept close to him, trying to ward off the blows which were aimed at him and warning him in time as his quick eye caught a near danger on either hand. Every instant he was heard calling out, “Father, ware right! Father, ware left!”

Suddenly a mounted knight appeared, who hailed the king in French. It was a French knight, who was fighting on the English side.

“Sir, sir!” he shouted, “I pray you yield!”

“To whom shall I yield?” said Jean, “Where is my cousin, the Prince of Wales?”

“Sir, yield to me; I will bring you to him.”

“Who are you?” said the king.

“Denis de Morbecque, a knight of Artois. I serve the King of England, not being able to live in France, for I have lost all I possessed there.”

“I yield to you,” said Jean, handing him his steel glove.

Then the whole crowd began to drag at him, each exclaiming, “I took him!” Both the king and the prince were sadly hustled until two barons broke through the throng by dint of their horses and led the two to the tent of the Prince of Wales, “and made him a present of the King of France!” says an old chronicler. “The prince also bowed full low before the king and received him as a king, properly and discreetly, as he well knew how to do.”

In the evening he entertained him and Philippe at supper and would not sit at the king’s table for all the king’s entreaty, but waited as a serving man, bending the knee before him and saying, “Dear sir, be pleased not to put on so bad a countenance because it has not pleased God to consent this day to your wishes. For, assuredly, my lord and father will show you all the honor and friendship he shall be able, and he will come to terms with you so reasonably that you shall remain good friends forever.”

Nor did all this end in words, but it went on for years during all the captivity of King Jean and Prince Philippe—first at Bordeaux and afterward at the then new Windsor Castle, in England, where galas, tournaments, hawking and hunting, and all sorts of entertainments were devised for them. When King Jean was brought from Bordeaux to England, where King Edward had prepared to meet him in great state, the French king was mounted on a tall cream-colored charger, and young Philippe rode by his side in great honor also, while the Prince of Wales sat on a small black horse, like an humble attendant on them both.

The two royal fathers met midway in that London street; the houses which lined the way were hung with rich tapestries, the trades were out in companies of many colors, the people thronged round the steel-clad cavalcades as they came together, and they filled the air with shouts.

But what two figures now most fill the eye when all that pageant has passed away? Not the father who stood by his son with such chivalrous faith, nor the father whose son stood by him with such chivalrous devotion, but the fair youth who carries that tuft of feathers upon his helmet, with its motto, “I serve,” and the lad whom all have heard of as Philippe the Bold: the boy-hero of Crecy doing chivalrous honor to the boy-hero of Poitiers!

The End

Edward carried his feeling of devotion to his son’s best interests to such a chivalrous extent that he made it a point of duty to keep out of the battle altogether. He was nowhere to be seen. He went into a windmill on a height nearby and watched the fight through one of the narrow windows in its upper story. He would not even put on his helmet. That was the way the father stood by his son—by showing absolute confidence in him and denying himself all the glory that might come from a great and important battle. And the young fellow was a thousandfold nerved and strengthened by knowing that his father fully trusted in him.

I need not give the details of the battle. It is sufficient to know that the first line of the French chivalry charged with the utmost fury. Among these was an ally of note, John, King of Bohemia, who with his barons and knights was not behindhand in the deadly onset, and yet this king was old and blind.

His was chivalry in another form. He insisted on having his stroke in the battle, and he plunged into it with his horse tied by its reins to one of his knights on either side. A plume of three ostrich feathers waved from his helmet, and the chroniclers say he laid about him well. After the battle, he and his two companions were found dead with their horses tied together.

But although the French were brave, they were not wise. For not only had they brought on the fight with headlong energy before they were prepared, but they had allowed Edward to place himself so that the afternoon sun, then near its setting, blazed full in their eyes and faces. Edward’s army fought in the shadow. The terrible English bowmen sent their deadly cloth-yard arrows so thick and fast into the dazzled and crowded ranks of fifteen thousand Genoese archers and the intermingled men-at-arms that the missiles filled the air like snow.

The Genoese were thrown into confusion, and this spread throughout the whole French army. The French king, with some of his dukes, flew foaming over the field in the rear, trying in vain to get up in time to swell the onset upon the English front.

But the onset had proved bad enough as it was. The knights around the young prince were frightened for his safety. One of them, Sir Thomas of Norwich, was sent back to Edward to ask him to come to the assistance of the prince.

“Sir Thomas,” said the king, “is my son dead, or unhorsed, or so wounded that he cannot help himself?”

“Not so, my lord, thank God. But he is fighting against great odds and is like to have need of your help.”

“Sir Thomas,” replied the king, “return to them who sent you and tell them, from me, not to send for me, whatever chance befall them, so long as my son is alive, and tell them that I bid them let the lad win his spurs. For I wish, if God so desire, that the day should be his and the honor thereof remain to him and to those to whom I have given him in charge.”

And there he stayed in the windmill till the battle was over. Soon the cry of victory reached him as the French fled in the darkness, leaving their dead strewn upon the field. Now the young prince appeared covered with all the glory that his father had coveted for him, bearing the ostrich plume which he had taken from the dead King of Bohemia.

The boy rode up with his visor raised; his face was as fair as a girl’s and glowed under a crown of golden hair. He bore his trophy aloft, and when it was placed as a knightly decoration above the crest of his helmet, he little thought that the triple tuft was to wave for more than five hundred years on England’s front, and that, next to the crown, there should be no badge so proudly known as the three feathers which nod above the coronet of the Prince of Wales.

We will leave him there and go on ten years.

Philippe, the French king, had passed away about six years before, and Jean, a wild character for such a trying time, had ascended the throne. He was always plunging himself into difficulties, and was often guilty of cruelty, and yet was of such a free, generous nature, and had so many of the virtues of chivalry in that day that he was known as Jean the Good. He was the extreme opposite to the grave, prudent, sagacious Edward III, who was still alive and well and King of England.

Some time after the victory of Crecy, Calais had been taken, and then both nations were glad to arrange a truce. Nine years of this had gone by when Edward thought it necessary to make another attempt on France. Young Edward, now twenty-five, came over alone, landing at Bordeaux. He had, meantime, gained great fame. He was now known as the Black Prince because he had a fancy for having his armor painted as black as midnight in order to give a greater brightness to his fresh blond complexion and golden hair.

Marshaling his little army of 12,000 men, he set out into the interior of France. When he had reached the neighborhood of Poitiers, he was astounded by the news that King Jean was both after him and behind him, with a force of 60,000 men. Here was Crecy over again as to numbers, but there was one thing that made it worse.

As Edward III not long before had instituted the famous Order of the Garter, which is even now one of the foremost orders of knighthood in Europe, so Jean, not to be behindhand, and in order to give a new chivalrous impulse to his nobles, had just instituted the Order of the Star. He made five hundred knights of this new order, every one of whom had vowed that he would never retreat and would sooner be slain than yield to an enemy.

The Black Prince thought it almost impossible to fight his way through such a desperately determined host. So he offered to restore all he had just conquered and to make another truce if he might pass by unmolested. But Jean would not consent. He must have Calais back again, and the prince, with one hundred of his best knights, into the bargain.

“This will never do,” thought the prince. “Better try for another Crecy.”

The End, Part Two

These two great battles really took place ten years apart, for one was fought in 1346 and the other in 1356. The battlefields also were wide apart, for Crecy was far in the north of France, near the coast of the English Channel, and Poitiers away in the south, deep in the interior, nearly three hundred miles from Crecy. But they have drawn near to each other in the mind of students of history because in both cases the French largely outnumbered the English; in both cases the English had gone so far into the country that their retreat seemed to be cut off; in both cases there was a most surprising and unexpected result, for the French were terribly defeated; and in both cases this happened because they made the same mistake. They trusted so much to their overwhelming numbers, to their courage and their valor, that they forgot to be careful about anything else, while the English made up for their small numbers by prudence, discipline, and skill, without which courage and valor are often of no avail.

It is quite exciting to read the description of these battles, with their archery fights, the clashing together of furious knights, the first brave advance, and the final running away, but after a while, the battles at large seem to fade out in the greater interest which surrounds the figures of two youngsters—one hardly more than fifteen, the other scarcely fourteen. For one carried off all the honors of the victory of Crecy, and the other redeemed from total dishonor the defeat of Poitiers. Let us now take up the romantic story of the English lad in the former battle and of the French lad in the latter.

When in 1346 Edward III of England had determined upon an invasion of France, he brought over his army in a fleet of nearly a thousand sails. He had with him not only the larger portion of his great nobles but also his eldest son, Edward Plantagenet, the Prince of Wales. He had good reasons for taking the boy. The prince was expected to become the next King of England. His father evidently thought him able to take a very important part in becoming also the King of France. If all the accounts of him are true, he was a remarkable youth, wonderfully strong and courageous, and wonderfully discreet for his years.

There was only one road to success or fame in those days, and that was the profession of arms. The ambition of every high-born young fellow was to become a knight. Knighthood was something that both king and nobles regarded as higher in some respects than even the royalty or nobility to which they were born. No one could be admitted into an order of the great brotherhood of knights, which extended all over Europe and formed an independent society, unless he had gone through severe discipline and had performed some distinguished deed of valor. Then he could wear the golden spurs; for knighthood had its earliest origin in the distinction of fighting on horseback, while ordinary soldiers fought on foot.

Although knighthood changed afterward, the word “chivalry” always expressed it, from cheval, a horse. And in addition to valor, which was the result of physical strength and courage, the knight was expected to be generous, courteous, faithful, devout, truthful, high-souled, and high-principled. Hence the epithet “chivalrous”, which even today is so often heard applied to men of especially fine spirit. “Honor” was the great word which included all these qualities then, as it does in some measure now.

As soon as King Edward landed at La Hague, he gave very clear evidence of the serious work he had cut out for his son and of his confidence that the youngster would be equal to it. He publicly pledged his boy, beforehand, to some great deed, and to a life of valor and honor.

In sight of the whole army, he went through the form of making him a knight. Young Edward, clad in armor, kneeled down before him on the wet sand, and the king touched his shoulder with his sword, saying, “I dub thee knight. Be brave, bold, and loyal!”

You may imagine how proudly then the young fellow seized lance and sword and shield, and sprang into his saddle at a leap, and with what high resolve he rode on beside his mailed and gallant father to deserve the name which that impressive ceremony had given him.

The army moved rapidly forward and northward toward Calais, conquering everything on its way till, when in the neighborhood of Crecy, the intelligence came that the French king, Philippe, with an army of one hundred and twenty thousand men and all the chivalry of France, had come in between it and the sea. There was no retreat possible. Edward had but thirty thousand to oppose this great host. He was in a dangerous spot also, but after a time, he succeeded in getting away to a good position, and there he awaited the onset.

No one will doubt that he was anxious enough, and yet what did he do? After arranging his troops in battle order, three battalions deep, he sent young Edward to the very front of the brilliant group of his finest barons to take the brunt of the terrible charge that was now to come. It shows of what stern material the king and the men of that time were made, for all his present love, all his future hope, lay around that gallant boy. But he knew that the value of the glory which might be earned was worth all the risk.

Besides, he was as much under chivalrous necessity to send him as the lad was under to go. That pledge to knighthood on the seashore had not been either lightly taken or lightly given. If chivalry was not equal to sacrifice, it was equal to nothing. There was keen wisdom, too, in the act. The king could count all the more on the enthusiasm, self-devotion, and valor of the knights and men-at-arms in whose keeping he had placed so precious a charge. That whole first battalion would be nerved to tenfold effort because the prince was among them, for everyone would be as deeply concerned as the father in the boy’s success.

The End, Part One

“’Tis not what I may give, but what thou mayst take, King,” the earl made answer. “I am thy prisoner. What wilt thou take to free me?”

“Nothing,” said the generous young Viking, advancing nearer to his handsome rival. “As thou didst say, we both be boys, and life is all before us. Earl, I give thee thy life, do thou but take oath before me to leave this my realm of Norway, to give up thy kingdom, and never to do battle against me hereafter.”

The conquered earl bent his fair young head. “Thou art a generous chief, King Olaf,” he said. “I take my life as thou dost give it, and all shall be as thou wilt.”

So Earl Hakon took the oath, and King Olaf righted his rival’s capsized war-ship, and refitted it from his own stores of booty, and thus the two lads parted. The young earl sailed off to his uncle, King Canute, in England, and the boy Viking hastened eastward to Vigen, where lived his mother, the Queen Aasta, whom he had not seen for full five years.

It was harvest-time in the year 1014, and without and within the long, low house at Vigen, all was excitement. For word had come that Olaf the sea-king had returned to his native land and was even now on his way to this, his mother’s house. Gay stuffs decorated the dull walls of the great-room, clean straw covered the earth-floor, and upon the long, four-cornered tables was spread a mighty feast of mead and ale and coarse but hearty food, such as the old Norse heroes drew their strength and muscle from.

At the doorway stood the Queen Aasta with her maidens, while before the entrance, with thirty “well-clothed men,” waited young Olaf’s stepfather, wise Sigurd Syr, gorgeous in a jeweled suit, a scarlet cloak, and a glittering golden helmet. The watchers on the house-tops heard a distant shout, then another and nearer one, and soon, down the highway, they caught the gleam of steel and the waving of many banners. And then they could distinguish the stalwart forms of Olaf’s chosen hundred men, their shining coats of ring-mail, their foreign helmets, and their crossleted shields flashing in the sun. In the very front rode old Rane, the helmsman, bearing the great white banner blazoned with the golden serpent, and behind him, cased in golden armor, his long brown hair flowing over his sturdy shoulders, rode the boy Viking, Olaf of Norway.

It was a brave homecoming, and as the stout young hero, leaping from his horse, knelt to receive his mother’s welcoming kiss, the people shouted for joy, the banners waved, the war-horns played their loudest. Thus, after five years of wandering, the boy came back in triumph to the home he left when but a wild and adventurous little fellow of twelve.

The hero of nine great sea-fights, and of many smaller ones, all before he was seventeen, young Olaf Haraldson was a remarkable boy, even in the days when all boys aimed to be battle-tried heroes. Toughened in frame and fiber by his five years of sea-roving, he had become strong and self-reliant, a man in action though but a boy in years.

“I am come,” he said to his mother and his stepfather, “to take the heritage of my forefathers. But not from Danish nor from Swedish kings will I supplicate that which is mine by right. I intend rather to seek my patrimony with battleaxe and sword, and I will so lay hand to the work that one of two things shall happen: Either I shall bring all this kingdom of Norway under my rule, or I shall fall here upon my inheritance in the land of my fathers.”

These were bold words for a boy of seventeen. But they were not idle boastings. Before a year had passed, young Olaf’s pluck and courage had won the day, and in harvest-time in the year 1015, being then but little more than eighteen years old, he was crowned King of Norway in the Drontheim, or Throne-home, of Nidaros, the royal city.

For fifteen years King Olaf the Second ruled his realm of Norway. The old record says that he was a good and very gentle man, but history shows his goodness and gentleness to have been of a rough and savage kind. The wild and stern experiences of his Viking days lived again even in his attempts to reform and benefit his land. When he who had himself been a pirate tried to put down piracy, and he who had been a wild young robber sought to force all Norway to become Christian, he did these things in so fierce and cruel a way that at last his subjects rebelled, and King Canute came over with a great army to wrest the throne from him.

On the bloody field of Stiklestad, in the year 1030, the stern king fell, said Sigvat, his saga-man, “beneath the blows by his own thoughtless people given.”

So King Canute conquered Norway; but after his death, Olaf’s son, Magnus the Good, regained his father’s throne. The people, sorrowful at their rebellion against King Olaf, forgot his stern and cruel ways and magnified all his good deeds so mightily that he was at last declared a saint, and the shrine of Saint Olaf is still one of the glories of the old cathedral in Drontheim.

And after King Magnus died, his descendants ruled in Norway for nearly four hundred years, and thus was brought to pass the promise of the dream that, in the forehold of the great dragon-ship, under the walls of old Bordeaux, came so many years before to the daring and sturdy young Olaf of Norway, the Boy Viking.

The End

Now in Norway Earl Eric was dead. For thirteen years he had usurped the throne that should have been filled by one of the great King Olaf’s line, and at his death his handsome young son, Earl Hakon the Fair, ruled in his father’s stead. And when young King Olaf heard this news, he shouted for joy and cried to Rane:

“Now, home in haste, for Norway shall be either Hakon’s heritage or mine!”

“’Tis a fair match of youth ’gainst youth,” said the trusty helmsman, “and if but fair luck go with thee, Norway shall be thine!”

So, from a place called Furovald, somewhere between the mouths of the Humber and Tees rivers on the English coast, King Olaf, with but two stout war-ships and two hundred and twenty well-armed and chosen men, shook out his purple sails to the North Sea blasts and steered straight for Norway. As if in league against this bold young Viking, the storm winds came rushing down from the mountains of Norway and the cold belt of the Arctic Circle and caught the two war-ships tossing in a raging sea. The storm burst upon them with terrific force, and the danger of shipwreck was great.

“But,” says the old record, “as they had a chosen company and the king’s luck with them, all went on well.”

Thou able chief!
With thy fearless crew
Thou meetest with skill and courage true
The wild sea’s wrath
On thy ocean path.
Though waves mast-high were breaking round,
Thou findest the middle of Norway’s ground,
With helm in hand
On Saelo’s strand.

Now Sael was Norse for “lucky”, and Saelo’s Island means the lucky island.

“I’ll be a lucky king for landing thus upon the Lucky Isle,” said rash young Olaf, in the only attempt at a joke we find recorded of him, as with a mighty leap he sprang ashore where the sliding keel of his war-ship plowed the shore of Saelo’s Isle.

“True, ’tis a good omen, King,” said old Rane the helmsman, following close behind.

But the soil of the lucky isle was largely clay, moist and slippery, and as the eager young Viking climbed the bank, his right foot slipped, and he would have fallen had not he struck his left foot firmly in the clay and thus saved himself. But to slip at all was a bad sign in those old, half-pagan, and superstitious times, and he said, ruefully, “An omen; an omen, Rane! The king falls!”

“Nay, ’tis the king’s luck,” says ready and wise old Rane. “Thou didst not fall, King. See; thou didst but set fast foot in this thy native soil of Norway.”

“Thou art a rare diviner, Rane,” laughed the young king, much relieved. And then he added solemnly, “It may be so if God doth will it so.”

And now news came that Earl Hakon, with a single war-ship, was steering north from Sogne Fjord. Olaf, pressing on, laid his two ships on either side of a narrow strait, or channel, in Sandunga Sound. Here he stripped his ships of all their war-gear and stretched a great cable deep in the water, across the narrow strait. Then he wound the cable-ends around the capstans, ordered all his fighting-men out of sight, and waited for his rival.

Soon Earl Hakon’s war-ship entered the strait, crowded with rowers and fighting-men. Seeing, as he supposed, but two harmless merchant-vessels lying on either side of the channel, the young earl bade his rowers pull between the two. Suddenly there was a stir on the quiet merchant-vessels. The capstan bars were manned, the sunken cable drawn taut. Up went the stern of Earl Hakon’s entrapped war-ship, down plunged her prow into the waves, and the water poured into the doomed boat.

A loud shout arose; the quiet merchant-vessels swarmed with mail-clad men, and the air filled with a shower of stones, and spears, and arrows. The surprise was complete. Tighter drew the cable, over toppled Earl Hakon’s vessel, and he and all his men bobbed among the billows, struggling for life.

“So,” says the record, “King Olaf took Earl Hakon and all his men whom they could get hold of out of the water and made them prisoners, but some were killed, and some were drowned.”

Into the forehold of the king’s ship the captive earl was led a prisoner, and there the young rivals for Norway’s crown faced each other. The two lads were of nearly the same age—between sixteen and seventeen—and young Earl Hakon was considered the handsomest youth in all Norway. His helmet was gone, his sword was lost, his ring-steel suit was sadly disarranged, and his long hair, fine as silk, was bound about his head with a gold ornament. Fully expecting the fate of all captives in those cruel days—instant death—the young earl nevertheless faced his boy conqueror proudly, resolved to meet his fate like a man.

“They speak truth who say of the house of Eric that ye be handsome men,” said the king, studying his prisoner’s face. “But now, Earl, even though thou be fair to look upon, thy luck hath failed thee at last.”

“Fortune changes,” said the young earl. “We both be boys, and thou, king, art perchance the shrewder youth. Yet had we looked for such a trick as thou hast played upon us, we had not thus been tripped upon thy sunken cables. Better luck next time.”

“Next time!” echoed the king, “Dost thou not know, Earl, that as thou standest there, a prisoner, there may be no ‘next time’ for thee?”

The young captive understood full well the meaning of the words. “Yes, King,” he said, “it must be only as thou mayst determine. Man can die but once. Speak on; I am ready!”

The End, Part Four

So young Olaf and old Rane put their heads together and decided to wreck the bridge by a bold Viking stroke. And this is how it is told in the Heimskringla, or Saga of King Olaf the Saint:

King Olaf ordered great platforms of floating wood to be tied together with hazel bands, and for this he took down old houses. With these as a roof, he covered over his ships so widely that it reached over the ships’ sides. Under this screen he set pillars so high and stout that there was room for swinging their swords, and the roofs were strong enough to withstand the stones cast down upon them.

“Now, out oars and pull for the bridge,” young Olaf commanded, and the roofed-over war-ships were rowed close up to London Bridge.

And as they came near the bridge, the chronicle says, “There were cast upon them, by the Danes upon the bridge, so many stones and missile weapons, such as arrows and spears, that neither helmet nor shield could hold out against it, and the ships themselves were so greatly damaged that many retreated out of it.” But the boy Viking and his Norsemen were there for a purpose and were not to be driven back by stones or spears or arrows. Straight ahead they rowed, quite up under the bridge.

“Out cables, all, and lay them around the piles,” the young sea-king shouted, and the half-naked rowers, unshipping their oars, reached out under the roofs and passed the stout cables twice around the wooden supports of the bridge. The loose end was made fast at the stern of each vessel, and then, turning and heading downstream, King Olaf’s twenty stout war-ships waited his word:

“Out oars!” he cried. “Pull, war-birds! Pull all, as if ye were for Norway!”

Forward and backward swayed the stout Norse rowers. Tighter and tighter pulled the cables. Fast down upon the straining war-ships rained the Danish spears and stones, but the wooden piles under the great bridge were loosened by the steady tug of the cables, and soon, with a sudden spurt, the Norse war-ships darted down the river, while the slackened cables towed astern the captured piles of London Bridge.

A great shout went up from the besiegers, and now, says the chronicle, “As the armed troops stood thick upon the bridge, and there were likewise many heaps of stones and other weapons upon it, the bridge gave way, and a great part of the men upon it fell into the river, and all the others fled—some into the castle, some into Southwark.”

And before King Ethelred the Unready could pull his ships to the attack, young Olaf’s fighting-men had sprung ashore and, storming the Southwark earthworks, carried all before them, and the battle of London Bridge was won.

And the young Olaf’s saga-man sang triumphantly:

London Bridge is broken down;
Gold is won and bright renown;
Shields resounding,
War-horns sounding,
Hildar shouting in the din!
Arrows singing,
Mail-coats ringing,
Odin makes our Olaf win!

And perhaps this wrecking of London Bridge so many hundred years ago by Olaf, the boy Viking of fifteen, may have been the origin of the old song-game dear to so many generations of children:

London Bridge is fallen down, fallen down, fallen down–
London Bridge is fallen down. My fair lady!

So King Ethelred won back his kingdom, and the boy Viking was honored above all others. To him was given the chief command in perilous expeditions against the Danes, and the whole defense of all the coast of England. North and south along the coast he sailed with all his war-ships, and the Danes and Englishmen long remembered the dashing but dubious ways of this young sea-rover, who swept the English coast and claimed his dues from friend and foe alike. For those were days of insecurity for merchant and trader and farmer, and no man’s wealth or life was safe except as he paid ready tribute to the fierce Norse allies of King Ethelred.

But soon after this, King Ethelred died, and young Olaf, thirsting for new adventures, sailed away to the south and fought his way all along the French coast as far as the mouth of the river Garonne. Many castles he captured; many rival Vikings subdued; much spoil he gathered; until at last his dragon-ships lay moored under the walls of old Bordeaux, waiting for fair winds to take him around to the Straits of Gibraltar and so on to the land of Jerusalem.

One day, in the booty-filled forehold of his dragon-ship, the young sea-king lay asleep. Suddenly, says the old record, “he dreamt a wondrous dream.”

“Olaf, great stem of kings, attend!” he heard a deep voice call, and looking up, the dreamer seemed to see before him “a great and important man, but of a terrible appearance withal.”

“If thou art Olaf the Brave, as men do call thee,” said the vision, “turn thyself to nobler deeds than Vikings’ ravaging and this wandering cruise. Turn back, turn back from thy purposeless journey to the land of Jerusalem, where neither honor nor fame awaits thee. Son of King Harald, return thee to thy heritage, for thou shalt be king over all Norway.”

Then the vision vanished and the young rover awoke to find himself alone, save for the sleeping foot-boy across the cabin door-way. So he quickly summoned old Rane, the helmsman, and told his dream.

“’Twas for thy awakening, King,” said his stout old follower. “’Twas the great Olaf, thine uncle, Olaf Tryggvesson the King, that didst call thee. Win Norway, King, for the portent is that thou and thine shall rule thy fatherland.”

And the war-ships’ prows were all turned northward again, as the boy Viking, following the promise of his dream, steered homeward for Norway and a throne.

The End, Part Three