The Herd Boy and His HermitYonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
General
The Herd Boy and His Hermit
Yonge, Charlotte M. (Charlotte Mary)
Clifford, Henry de Clifford, 14th lord, 1455?-1523 -- Fiction; Henry VI, King of England, 1421-1471 -- Fiction
Since he had been actually in arms against King Edward it was not
thought safe to assert his claims to his father’s domains, but the lady
gave up to him a portion of her own inheritance from the Vescis, where
he and Anne were able to live in Barden Tower in Yorkshire, not far from
Bolton Abbey. So Hal’s shepherd days were over, though he still loved
country habits and ways. Hob came to be once more his attendant, Dolly
was Anne’s bower-woman, and Simon Bunce Sir Harry’s squire, though he
never ceased blaming himself for having left his master, dead as he
thought, when even a poor hound was more trusty.
Florimond was restored to the Prioress, who was reinstated at Greystone,
a graver woman than before she had set forth, the better for having
watched deeper devotion at the Minoresses’, and still more for the
terrible realities of the battle of Barnet. At Bolton Abbey Harry found
monks who encouraged his craving for information on natural science,
and could carry him on much farther in these researches than his hermit,
though he always maintained that the royal anchorite and prisoner saw
farther into heavenly things than any other whom he had known, and
that his soul and insight rose the higher with his outward troubles and
bodily decay.
So peacefully went the world with them till Henry was one-and-thirty,
and then the tidings of Bosworth Field came north. The great tragedy of
Plantagenet was complete, and the ambitious and blood-stained house
of York, who had avenged the usurpation of Henry of Lancaster, had
perished, chiefly by the hands of each other, and the distantly related
descendant of John of Gaunt, Henry Tudor, triumphed.
The Threlkelds were not slow to recollect that it was time for the
Cliffords to show their heads; moreover, that the St. Johns of Bletso
were related to the Tudors. Though now an aged woman, she descended
from her hills, called upon her son and his wife with their little
nine-year-old son to come with her, and pay homage to the new sovereign
in their own names, and rode with them to Westminster.
There a very different monarch from the saint of Harry’s memory received
and favoured him. The lands of Westmoreland were granted to him as his
right, and on their return, Master Lorimer coming by special invitation,
the family were welcomed at Brougham Castle, the cradle of their
race, where Harry Clifford, no longer an outlaw, began the career thus
described:
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
In him the savage virtue of the race,
Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts were dead,
Nor did he change, but kept in lofty place
The wisdom that adversity had bred.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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