Penshurst Castle in the Time of Sir Philip SidneyMarshall, Emma
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Penshurst Castle in the Time of Sir Philip Sidney
Marshall, Emma
Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554-1586 -- Fiction
'Mary! you can scarce picture to yourself the sight which I looked on from
a casement by the side of my dear mistress. All the long train of mourners
taken from every class, the uplifted standard with the Cross of St George,
the esquires and gentlemen in their long cloaks of mourning garb, these
were a wondrous spectacle. In the long train was Sir Philip's war horse,
led by a footman and ridden by a little page bearing a broken lance,
followed by another horse, like the first, richly caparisoned, ridden by a
boy holding a battle-axe reversed. All this I say I gazed at as a show, and
my mistress, like myself, was tearless. I could not believe, nay, I could
not think of our hero as connected with this pageant. Nay, nor with that
coffin, shrouded in black velvet, carried by seven yeomen, and the pall
borne by those gentlemen who loved him best, his dearest friends, Sir
Fulke Greville, Sir Edward Dyer, Edward Watson, and Thomas Dudley.
'Next came the two brothers, Sir Robert--now Lord of Penshurst--chief
mourner, and behind, poor Mr Thomas Sidney, who was so bowed down with
grief that he could scarce support himself.
'Earls and nobles, headed by my Lord of Leicester, came after; and the
gentlemen from the Low Countries, of whom you will have heard, and all the
great city folk--Lord Mayor and Sheriffs--bringing up the rear.
'My dear mistress and I, with many other ladies of her household, having
watched the long train pass us from the Minories, were conveyed by back
ways to St Paul's, and, from a seat appointed us and other wives of nobles
and their gentlewomen, we were present at the last scene.
'It was when the coffin, beautifully adorned with escutcheons, was placed
on a bier prepared for it, that my mistress said, in a low voice, heard by
me--perhaps by me only,--
'"_Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur._"
'These words were the motto on the coffin, and they were the words on which
the preacher tried to enforce his lesson.
'Up to the moment when the double volley was fired, telling us within the
church that the body rested in peace, there had been profound stillness.
'Then the murmur of a multitude sorrowing and sighing, broke upon the ear;
and yet, beyond those whispered words, my lady had not made any sign.
'Now she laid her hand in mine and said,--
'"Let us go and see where they have laid him."
'I gave notice to the gentlemen in attendance that this was my lady's
desire. We had to wait yet for a long space; the throng, so closely packed,
must needs disperse.
'At length way was made for us, and we stood by the open grave together--my
mistress, whose life had been bound up in her noble brother's, and I, to
whom he had been, from my childhood's days to the present, the hero to
whose excellence none could approach--a sun before whose shining other
lights grew dim.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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