“Now, God be praised my stroke slew thee not,” cried Du Guesclin, raising him from the earth. “I ever thought we should meet again, but I deemed not it should be thus.”
But neither the admiration of the whole army, nor the praise of grim old Chandos himself, nor the thanks and rewards heaped on them by the Black Prince (who welcomed their prisoner as if Du Guesclin had been his best friend instead of his most redoubtable foe), could chase from the brows of the twins the gloomy foreboding that clouded them; and, as they entered their tent that night, Alured said sadly—
“My mind misgives me, brother, that God is not with us in this work, and that it will not prosper.”
He spoke but too truly. History has told how their gallant host melted beneath the blighting breath of pestilence and famine—how its great leader saw his men perish round him while waiting in vain for the fulfilment of the promises that his faithless ally had never meant to keep—how he was forced to drain his own coffers to feed the men whom the crowned ruffian who owed his throne to them had left to starve and die—and how he finally repassed the Pyrenees with the wreck of his splendid army, heavy and sick at heart, bearing with him the seeds of the fell disease that was to doom him, only a few years later, to an untimely grave, while the royal cut-throat whom he had championed, within a twelvemonth of his restoration, lost crown and life.
Years rolled by, and brought many startling changes.
The Black Prince slept his last sleep in a stately tomb beneath the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral. His terrible father, Edward III., had followed him to the grave, leaving all his mighty schemes of conquest to come to nought. Sir John Chandos had died in battle, as he had always hoped to do; and many another great captain was missing from the ranks of English chivalry. Meanwhile Archbishop William de Wykeham, best and kindliest of scholars and Churchmen, was leaving a more enduring monument than all their blood-won honours, by planting at Winchester the germ of one of England’s noblest schools.
The English crown had passed to the weak and worthless Richard II., in whose early years the whole land was shaken by the terrible convulsion of “Wat Tyler’s Rising.” Of this despairing effort of the downtrodden people to obtain the right to be treated as human beings, the greatest historian of the age coolly wrote: “There happened in England great commotion among the lower ranks of the people, by which England was near ruined without resource, and all through the too great comfort of the commonalty”! What that “too great comfort” was any man who can bear to read “The Vision of Piers Plowman” (written by one who had himself seen all the horrors he described) may judge for himself.