It was Friday, the 28th of October, 1216, the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, and Gloucester presented a scene of considerable excitement, though the weather was the reverse of exhilarating. Not a glimpse was there of the “merry sunshine, which makes the heart so gay.” The sky was obscured with a drizzling mist; gloom hung over the whole city; the Severn, swollen with recent rain, threatened to overflow its sedgy banks; the orchards and woodlands around were soddened with wet; and the deer in the king’s park crouched together, sought shelter under the dripping branches of the trees, looking for all the world as if they had some instinctive dread of a return of the flood of Deucalion-- “Piscium cum summâ genus hæsit ulmo, Nota quæ sedes fuerat columbis, Et superjecto pavidæ natarunt Æquore damæ.” Nevertheless Gloucester was excited. Men with white crosses on their breasts strode hither and thither, gossiping citizens ventured forth into the wet streets to hear the latest news, and laughing nymphs with fair faces gazed watchfully from basement and loophole, as if impatient for some spectacle to gratify their curiosity; for on that day, in spite of Louis of France and the Anglo-Norman barons who had brought him into England, Henry, the son of John, was to be crowned king, and the place appointed for the ceremony was the abbey of Gloucester--that abbey to which, more than a hundred years later, the remains of his murdered grandson were to be brought by Abbot Thokey from Berkeley Castle, under circumstances so melancholy. At this time Henry of Winchester was in his tenth year. He was a strong, healthy boy, and good-looking, with the fair hair and fair complexion of the Plantagenets. But one unfortunate defect there was in his countenance. Part of one of his eyelids hung down in such a way as partly to cover the eyeball, and thus gave an unpleasant expression to a face which would otherwise have been handsome. Such as the boy was, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, took him by the hand, led him to the castle hall in which were assembled Neville, William Ferrars, Earl of Derby, and the few magnates who had come at his invitation to Gloucester, and, placing him in the midst of them, said-- “Behold your king!” The nobles, who had been accustomed to the second Henry, and Richard, and John, and who had never pictured to themselves a monarch of ten, scarcely knew how to act. Never, indeed, save in the case of Edgar Atheling, had a child figured as King of England, and how he was to deal with the difficulties that beset the throne was more than they could imagine. For a time they remained silent. But Pembroke again spoke, pointed out the degradation of a foreign prince being in possession of the kingdom, and asked them earnestly to crown the rightful heir and drive out the foreigner and his myrmidons. Suddenly, as if by inspiration, they all threw off their reserve, and cried with one voice--