In such an agony he bethought him of the saints, and what help he could implore. There was one with whose name all Christendom was alive--St. Thomas, murdered at Canterbury not ten years before by the agents of the Angevin, his rival. The archbishop had been his guest, he had succoured him--through policy and as a lever against the house which was his greatest feudatory, and almost his master; the house of Anjou, against which he had warred in vain. There, in England, its head, Henry, was a great king, his equal. Louis, the king, determined to pray at that shrine. They could not dissuade him. They told him it was perilous to put himself unarmed into his enemy’s hand; they warned him of his failing powers, but his intention stood; and immediately after the Assumption he set out for the sea. His weakness hampered him. He was six days on his journey to the coast. He reached it at Wissant, on the Straits, in the evening of his son’s fourteenth birthday, the 21st of August. On the morrow, the Octave of the Feast, he crossed the Narrows and came into Dover Harbour, an inlet of the hills, and so went ashore, the first King of France to land in this island. Henry, the king, came down to meet him, and they went together up to Canterbury to pray at the shrine. There, in the crypt, at the tomb under the high altar, King Louis prayed for his son’s recovery and for the strength of the Capetian line. King Louis had upon his finger a certain stone, the most precious and (some said) the greatest in the world; it was called the Royal Jewel, and men knew of it everywhere. All manner of stories were told of it: how it shone in the dark with a smouldering light, how it was worth the ransom of a kingdom, how the saint had claimed it in a vision. But these stories were only tales. The great stone was its own title. This stone King Louis took off as he knelt at the shrine, and offered it to be the saint’s for ever. There they hung it, and later they put a silver angel before it, pointing to it. There the stone shone before the shrine three hundred years and more, displayed whenever the rich cover of the shrine was lifted for the pilgrims, and giving birth to legend upon legend; until, when more than three hundred years had passed, another King of England--another Henry, the Tudor--destroyed that shrine. He, in his turn, took that famous stone and had it set in a ring to wear on his enormous thumb; and after him his daughter Mary had it set in a collar she wore; but what became of it after that, or where it is now, I do not know. So the king gave the stone, and prayed at the shrine of St. Thomas for his son, who lay between life and death far off in France, the last of such a line.