The Baron de Courcy was a descendant of an old and famous Norman house, distinguished in the days of the Conquest, when Aymer de Courcy, refusing to share in the sports of England, retired to his Norman estate, although he had fought at Hastings, and enjoyed the favour of the Conqueror. His good qualities, well known to those who have read of them in the “Andredsweald,” a chronicle of the house of Michelham in Sussex,[57] had not suffered in transmission through so many generations: and our Cuthbert found a warm reception in the Norman household. And so they both gained a home, each after his own heart, and the recent trials seemed only to enhance the sweet sense of security they now enjoyed. “When the shore is gained, at last, Who will count the billows past?” But they had not been three months in their new homes, when tidings arrived from England of the death of their oppressor. Henry VIII. had passed to his last account on the early morn of the twenty-eighth of January, fifteen-hundred and forty-seven; passed from his earthly flatterers and parasites, who had treated him as if he were a demi-god, to the awful judgment bar whither he had sent before him by the hands of the executioner some seventy thousand of those subjects who had been committed by the King of kings to his care. _There_, where prince and peasant, lord and slave, king and monk, are all equal, where there is no respect of persons, we leave him and close our tragical story. FOOTNOTES [57] The “Andredsweald,” a tale of the Norman Conquest, by the same author. Epilogue. Here, when I first told this story to a generation of schoolboys, long since dispersed over the face of this busy world, I concluded my tale, and returned to my study, but I was followed thither by some young and eager story-devourers, who, like Oliver Twist, “asked for more.” “Please, sir, we want to know what became of the treasure?” “Oh,” said I, “I forgot to mention that in Queen Mary’s reign, Cuthbert paid a visit to England in the train of the French Ambassador, Monsieur de Noailles, and found an opportunity of revealing the secret to the Queen. He was sent with some others to Glastonbury, and there they found the mouldering skeleton of Sir John Redfyrne, keeping watch over the chest.” “But how did they know who he was?” “The name was engraved on his sword, ‘John Redfyrne, Knight.’” “Did Cuthbert know that it was his uncle?” “Not at the time, nor for years afterwards.” “I fancy,” said a youngster, “Cuthbert would still have preferred the name ‘_Trevannion_’ to ‘_Redfyrne_,’ even if he had known.” “But what did they do with the treasure? Was the Abbey ever rebuilt?” “No, for one of the conditions which the nobles, who held the Abbey lands, exacted when Mary restored the Papal Supremacy, was, that they should be left undisturbed in all their ill-gotten possessions: you may be sure that the gold was applied to such uses as the last Abbot himself would have approved.”