make another, they put a circle of plain gold upon his head
instead. ‘We have been the enemies of this child’s father,’ said
Lord Pembroke, a good and true gentleman, to the few Lords who were
present, ‘and he merited our ill-will; but the child himself is
innocent, and his youth demands our friendship and protection.’
Those Lords felt tenderly towards the little boy, remembering their
own young children; and they bowed their heads, and said, ‘Long
live King Henry the Third!’
Next, a great council met at Bristol, revised Magna Charta, and
made Lord Pembroke Regent or Protector of England, as the King was
too young to reign alone. The next thing to be done, was to get
rid of Prince Louis of France, and to win over those English Barons
who were still ranged under his banner. He was strong in many
parts of England, and in London itself; and he held, among other
places, a certain Castle called the Castle of Mount Sorel, in
Leicestershire. To this fortress, after some skirmishing and
truce-making, Lord Pembroke laid siege. Louis despatched an army
of six hundred knights and twenty thousand soldiers to relieve it.
Lord Pembroke, who was not strong enough for such a force, retired
with all his men. The army of the French Prince, which had marched
there with fire and plunder, marched away with fire and plunder,
and came, in a boastful swaggering manner, to Lincoln. The town
submitted; but the Castle in the town, held by a brave widow lady,
named NICHOLA DE CAMVILLE (whose property it was), made such a
sturdy resistance, that the French Count in command of the army of
the French Prince found it necessary to besiege this Castle. While
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he was thus engaged, word was brought to him that Lord Pembroke,
with four hundred knights, two hundred and fifty men with crossbows,
and a stout force both of horse and foot, was marching
towards him. ‘What care I?’ said the French Count. ‘The
Englishman is not so mad as to attack me and my great army in a
walled town!’ But the Englishman did it for all that, and did it –
not so madly but so wisely, that he decoyed the great army into the
narrow, ill-paved lanes and byways of Lincoln, where its horsesoldiers
could not ride in any strong body; and there he made such
havoc with them, that the whole force surrendered themselves
prisoners, except the Count; who said that he would never yield to
any English traitor alive, and accordingly got killed. The end of
this victory, which the English called, for a joke, the Fair of
Lincoln, was the usual one in those times – the common men were
slain without any mercy, and the knights and gentlemen paid ransom
and went home.
The wife of Louis, the fair BLANCHE OF CASTILE, dutifully equipped
a fleet of eighty good ships, and sent it over from France to her
husband’s aid. An English fleet of forty ships, some good and some
bad, gallantly met them near the mouth of the Thames, and took or
sunk sixty-five in one fight. This great loss put an end to the
French Prince’s hopes. A treaty was made at Lambeth, in virtue of
which the English Barons who had remained attached to his cause
returned to their allegiance, and it was engaged on both sides that
the Prince and all his troops should retire peacefully to France.
It was time to go; for war had made him so poor that he was obliged
to borrow money from the citizens of London to pay his expenses
home.
Lord Pembroke afterwards applied himself to governing the country
justly, and to healing the quarrels and disturbances that had
arisen among men in the days of the bad King John. He caused Magna
Charta to be still more improved, and so amended the Forest Laws
that a Peasant was no longer put to death for killing a stag in a
Royal Forest, but was only imprisoned. It would have been well for
England if it could have had so good a Protector many years longer,