Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 15
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Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 15
Literature -- Collections
The cry was "To the church! To the church!"
There at least there would be immediate safety.
The archbishop had told the knights that they would find him where
they left him. He did not choose to show fear; or he was afraid, as
some thought, of losing his martyrdom. He would not move. The bell had
ceased. They reminded him that vespers had begun, and that he ought to
be in the cathedral. Half yielding, half resisting, his friends swept
him down the passage into the cloister. His cross had been forgotten
in the haste. He refused to stir till it was fetched and carried
before him as usual. Then only, himself incapable of fear, and
rebuking the terror of the rest, he advanced deliberately to the door
into the south transept. His train was scattered behind him, all along
the cloister from the passage leading out of the palace. As he entered
the church, cries were heard, from which it became plain that the
knights had broken into the archbishop's room, had found the passage,
and were following him. Almost immediately Fitzurse, Tracy, De
Morville, and Le Breton were discerned in the dim light, coming
through the cloister in their armor, with drawn swords, and axes in
their left hands. A company of men-at-arms was behind them. In front
they were driving before them a frightened flock of monks.
From the middle of the transept in which the archbishop was standing,
a single pillar rose into the roof. On the eastern side of it opened a
chapel of St. Benedict, in which were the tombs of several of the old
primates. On the west, running of course parallel to the nave, was a
Lady chapel. Behind the pillar, steps led up into the choir, where
voices were already singing vespers. A faint light may have been
reflected into the transept from the choir tapers, and candles may
perhaps have been burning before the altars in the two chapels; of
light from without through the windows at that hour there could have
been none. Seeing the knights coming on, the clergy who had entered
with the archbishop closed the door and barred it. "What do you fear?"
he cried in a clear, loud voice. "Out of the way, you coward! the
Church of God must not be made a fortress." He stepped back and
reopened the door with his own hands, to let in the trembling wretches
who had been shut out among the wolves. They rushed past him, and
scattered in the hiding-places of the vast sanctuary, in the crypt, in
the galleries, or behind the tombs. All, or almost all, even of his
closest friends,--William of Canterbury, Benedict, John of Salisbury
himself,--forsook him to shift for themselves, admitting frankly that
they were unworthy of martyrdom. The archbishop was left alone with
his chaplain Fitzstephen, Robert of Merton his old master, and Edward
Grim, the stranger from Cambridge,--or perhaps with Grim only, who
says that he was the only one who stayed, and was the only one
certainly who showed any sign of courage. A cry had been raised in the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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