Not all visitors to Canterbury were so evilly entreated as the Duc de Nivernais. Indeed, the city has been remarkable rather for its lavish and abounding hospitality than for any attempted over-reaching of the stranger. But since those strangers were chiefly Kings and Emperors, and great personages of that kind, perhaps it is little to be wondered at that the citizens, to say nothing of those greedy time-servers, the Priors and monks of Christ Church Priory and the Priory of Saint Augustine, rendered to those great ones of the earth the most abject suit and service. Almost every English sovereign has been here at some time or another, and many a foreign potentate besides. Henry the Second, it is true, walked into the city, barefoot, from Harbledown, and so to the Cathedral, doing abject penance for the murder of Becket, four years previously, and it seems to be equally true that as he proceeded to Becket's shrine he was scourged by the monks on his bare back and shoulders with knotted cords; but I think they would have laid on harder and with a better will had the penitent not been of so exalted a station. In short, I have little faith in the reported rigours of that punishment. A few years later came Henry's son, Richard Lion Heart, enlarged from his foreign prison. He landed at the port of Sandwich, and walked barefoot into Canterbury--so inimical was Saint Thomas to shoe-leather. Edward the First was pious enough to lay the Crown of Scotland before the Saint's shrine, and another Edward--the Black Prince--came here, in all humility, with the captive King of France. Another warrior, as brave and as ill-fated--Henry the Fifth--paid his devoirs to Becket as he came up the road, fresh from his glorious French campaigns. Another Henry, the Eighth and last of his name, bowed before the shrine in 1520, in company with the Emperor Charles the Fifth. On that occasion he was as fervent a worshipper as could well be desired, and as sincere as it is possible for a man to be who is at the same time a King and half a Welshman. No thoughts of spoliation of the Church then passed his mind. Indeed, the ecclesiastical dignitaries of the time made much of his visit, which seems to have been celebrated in a more than royal manner, if we may trust the chroniclers.