with ropes; being directed by their guards to advance as near the king's person as was deemed prudent, the unfortunate culprits, not knowing how this pageant was to terminate, tremblingly awaited their doom; although, it must be confessed, Sherwin and Hubert Betts suffered more from the moral degradation to which they were thus exposed than when they expected the next moment would have terminated their existence. You might have heard a pin drop in that spacious edifice as the lord chancellor arose, and before addressing the culprits, severely censured the negligence and pusillanimity of the mayor and aldermen, attributing to the slothfulness and want of decision in the city council all the evils which had afterwards accrued. He then pointed out to the former the enormity of their crimes, the mischief they had wrought, and the justice of the sentence by which they were adjudged to die. At these words the wretched prisoners, who had hoped to obtain forgiveness, threw themselves on their knees, and in shrill accents, which seemed to pierce the very roof of the lofty hall, cried to the king for mercy. Anxious to stop the din, and advertised beforehand of their sovereign's dispositions, the assembled nobles pleaded so strongly for a free pardon, that Henry, after a wellfeigned show of reluctance, acceded to their request. Then arose another deafening clamour, in keeping with the character of the age; the culprits with one accord started to their feet, shouted until the rafters rang again, casting as they did so their halters towards the ceiling. Order being at length restored, the prisoners were marched off by their guard, and their clothes being restored, were allowed to depart to their respective homes, whilst, with another severe reprimand, the citizens were dismissed. The gallows were taken down, and a disturbance which had lasted more than a fortnight was at length terminated with less effusion of blood than from the monarch's natural disposition had been at first anticipated; but there is little doubt that to this insurrection may be attributed the gradual disuse and final abolition of the great city Mayings and games: the shaft in Cornhill never having been erected since that time, but reclining ignominiously over the doors and under the penthouses of Alley Gate (commonly called Shaft Alley), until a second and more serious commotion, in the reign of Edward VI., consummated the downfall of May games, to the great delight of the Puritan party, many of whom, after the example of Stubbes, in his Anatomy of Abuses, denounced as sinful those sports which had for centuries conduced to the harmless pleasures and joyous hilarity of the citizens of London. 79 CHAPTER VII. "In happy ignorance the children played; Rogers. DURING the three years which had elapsed since the close of the last chapter little occurred to disturb the monotony of the family at Hog Lane; in his domestic circle its master was more gloomy and taciturn than ever, absenting himself for hours, and not unfrequently returning considerably past midnight in a state which fully justified the gossip of the neighbourhood, that Master Charles Sherwin had brought more from Germany than his craft, and was ruining himself by his constant visits to Three Cranes Lane, in the Vintry (for since the sad fate of Lincoln he had never set foot within the Pope's Head tavern). To Dame Agnes, the sweetness of whose temper was in no wise improved, he was indifferent rather than unkind, except when, during one of her not unfrequent fits of remorse, she reproached him with the death of her little Gertrude unbaptised, or the no less infidel state of his living children. Then, indeed, he resembled a demoniac in his wrath; his oaths and imprecations were so frightful as effectually to silence his wife, and strengthen Sibil's halffluctuating resolution to tear herself from those to whom she was so devotedly attached, and decide at once the rival pretensions of the two suitors, one or other of whom generally dogged her footsteps whenever the pretty serving-maiden stirred ten paces from her master's door. In his sober intervals, Sherwin would still sport with his bright-eyed Madge, whose joyous spirit penetrated and at times dispersed the cloudy atmosphere by which it was surrounded; while towards Alice, since his unex pected respite from an ignominious death, his conduct was strangely at variance with the general tone of his character. She, and she alone, was exempt from those wild bursts of rage with which he visited the other members of his household; yet in both words and actions could be discerned more of gratitude towards his preserver, and a species of deference as to some superior being, than of that affectionate regard which ought to exist between parent and child. This strange influence was, however, of incalculable advantage to Alice, since it served as a shield between her and her mother's restless jealousy, which ever sought to separate her from the society of young Aubrey de Buron. For the latter the attachment of Dame Agnes seemed daily to augment, until it assumed the form of a foolish and perverse infatuation for one who looked upon these demonstrations at best as irksome; and there was little doubt that, but for the pleasure he felt in the society of his gentle companion, her querulous complaints and reproaches would have caused the high-spirited page of Wolsey to follow the example of his cousin Florence, and absent himself altogether. During the hours of lassitude which had succeeded his illness, and prevented his immediate return to court, Aubrey had ample opportunities of observing the different characters of those amongst whom he had been so unwillingly thrown; and it was with a feeling akin to horror, that the fervent and well-instructed youth observed the total absence of religion in all, if we except Sibil, who suffered a continual domestic persecution from the gibes of Sherwin and the sullenness of her mistress, after her daily visits to the church of St. Botolph's. Though listless, and apparently indifferent to external objects, Aubrey had been a keen and sharp-sighted discerner. Accustomed to the manners of a court, he observed with surprise the innate nobleness of disposition and natural polish which characterised the neglected child. Had he been older, he would have trembled at the concentration of feeling, the tremulous sensibility which made her shrink from the cold realities of ordinary life and dwell apart, as has been said, in a visionary world of her own creation. Endowed with gifts which, though rare and beautiful, are invariably fatal to their possessor when undirected by a fixed principle of religion, her calm disregard of rank, splendour, and the world's conventionalities, and even that extraordinary courage to which her father owed his preservation, contained the germs of a dangerous self-reliance, which might in time lead to a contempt of those feminine virtues and those nameless self-sacrifices, the persevering but unobtrusive practice of which constitutes the truly heroic, and carries the spirit of martyrdom into all the petty trivialities of every-day existence. And yet, contradictory as it may appear, Alice's disposition was pliant as the young sucker of the creeping ivy, increasing in tenacity as in growth, seeking eagerly a support to raise itself from the earth, and to which, when once found, it adheres for ever, indifferent whether it be the crumbling ruin, to which it lends a charm, or the sturdy and healthful tree, beneath whose spreading branches it can luxuriate in safety. All this was of course a sealed book to one so young as Aubrey; he saw merely an affectionate and intellectual child, with a mind which he resolved to cultivate, and to which he longed to impart some portion of that saving knowledge which from his earliest infancy had been instilled into his own. This he soon discovered was a task both dangerous and difficult, theology being in Master Sherwin's household an interdicted topic; so that, although the course of three years had greatly added to the girl's mental acquirements, her almost self-taught religion was a species of poetic fiction, rejecting all that trenched on severity or self-denial, and incapable consequently of producing any solid fruit. It was not long before her every joy and grief became centred in her young tutor; and as the latter feeling was never awakened but by his unavoidable absence, her existence was gilded by a happiness as great, though more perilous than that enjoyed by her light-hearted sister. Alice had, however, scarcely passed her tenth birthday, when the first shaft of woe pierced her bosom; she received it quietly and uncomplainingly, and without an effort to cast forth G |