Still, Becket stood unwounded. “Strike! strike, you others!” shouted the Norman, as he grasped the maimed but still-resolved protector of his master, and held him off by the exertion of his entire strength; “strike! strike!” And they did strike, fearlessly--mercilessly! Hugues de Morville smote him with a mace upon his temples, and he fell, stunned, but still alive, face downward on the pavement; and Reginald Fitz-Urse, whirling his espaldron around his head, brought it down with such reckless fury upon the naked skull, that the point clove right through it, down to the marble pavement, on which it yet alighted with a degree of violence so undiminished, that it was shivered to the very hilt, and the strong arms of him who wielded it were jarred up to the shoulders, as if by an electric shock. One of the men-at-arms, who had rushed in during the struggle, spurned with his foot the motionless and senseless clay. “Thus perish all,” he said, “all foemen of the king, and of the gentle Normans--all who dare, henceforth, to arouse the base and slavish Saxons against their free and princely masters!” Thus fell the Saxon prelate, ruthlessly butchered at the very shrine of God--not so much that he was a Romish priest, and an upholder of the rights of Rome, as that he was a Saxon-man, a vindicator of the liberties of England! Yet, though the pope absolved that king whose cruel will had, in truth, done the deed, yet was that deed not unavenged. If the revolt and treachery of all most dear to him, the hatred of his very flesh and blood, the unceasing enmity of his own sons, a miserable old age, and a heart-broken death-bed--if these things may be deemed Heaven’s vengeance upon murder--then, of a surety, that murder was avenged! THE FATE OF THE BLANCHE NAVIRE.[B] “The bark that held a prince went down, The sweeping waves rolled on, And what was England’s glorious crown To him who wept a son?”--HEMANS.