prisoner, you will be able to bring the King your uncle to terms!’
But she was not to be easily taken. She was old enough by this
time – eighty – but she was as full of stratagem as she was full of
years and wickedness. Receiving intelligence of young Arthur’s
approach, she shut herself up in a high tower, and encouraged her
soldiers to defend it like men. Prince Arthur with his little army
besieged the high tower. King John, hearing how matters stood,
came up to the rescue, with HIS army. So here was a strange
family-party! The boy-Prince besieging his grandmother, and his
uncle besieging him!
This position of affairs did not last long. One summer night King
John, by treachery, got his men into the town, surprised Prince
Arthur’s force, took two hundred of his knights, and seized the
Prince himself in his bed. The Knights were put in heavy irons,
and driven away in open carts drawn by bullocks, to various
dungeons where they were most inhumanly treated, and where some of
them were starved to death. Prince Arthur was sent to the castle
of Falaise.
One day, while he was in prison at that castle, mournfully thinking
it strange that one so young should be in so much trouble, and
looking out of the small window in the deep dark wall, at the
summer sky and the birds, the door was softly opened, and he saw
his uncle the King standing in the shadow of the archway, looking
very grim.
‘Arthur,’ said the King, with his wicked eyes more on the stone
floor than on his nephew, ‘will you not trust to the gentleness,
the friendship, and the truthfulness of your loving uncle?’
‘I will tell my loving uncle that,’ replied the boy, ‘when he does
me right. Let him restore to me my kingdom of England, and then
come to me and ask the question.’
The King looked at him and went out. ‘Keep that boy close
prisoner,’ said he to the warden of the castle.
Then, the King took secret counsel with the worst of his nobles how
the Prince was to be got rid of. Some said, ‘Put out his eyes and
keep him in prison, as Robort of Normandy was kept.’ Others said,
‘Have him stabbed.’ Others, ‘Have him hanged.’ Others, ‘Have him
poisoned.’
King John, feeling that in any case, whatever was done afterwards,
it would be a satisfaction to his mind to have those handsome eyes
burnt out that had looked at him so proudly while his own royal
eyes were blinking at the stone floor, sent certain ruffians to
Falaise to blind the boy with red-hot irons. But Arthur so
pathetically entreated them, and shed such piteous tears, and so
appealed to HUBERT DE BOURG (or BURGH), the warden of the castle,
who had a love for him, and was an honourable, tender man, that
Hubert could not bear it. To his eternal honour he prevented the
torture from being performed, and, at his own risk, sent the
savages away.
The chafed and disappointed King bethought himself of the stabbing
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suggestion next, and, with his shuffling manner and his cruel face,
proposed it to one William de Bray. ‘I am a gentleman and not an
executioner,’ said William de Bray, and left the presence with
disdain.
But it was not difficult for a King to hire a murderer in those
days. King John found one for his money, and sent him down to the
castle of Falaise. ‘On what errand dost thou come?’ said Hubert to
this fellow. ‘To despatch young Arthur,’ he returned. ‘Go back to
him who sent thee,’ answered Hubert, ‘and say that I will do it!’
King John very well knowing that Hubert would never do it, but that
he courageously sent this reply to save the Prince or gain time,
despatched messengers to convey the young prisoner to the castle of
Rouen.
Arthur was soon forced from the good Hubert – of whom he had never
stood in greater need than then – carried away by night, and lodged
in his new prison: where, through his grated window, he could hear