take the King with you; and to-morrow, if you please, be good enough to return. I will take counsel with my son and my people, and provide some one to undertake the business; and may God guide our counsels aright!” Next morning he called his son, his wife, his nephew John, and his most trusted advisers, and told them his project: that the King “should be committed to God and the Pope, and to the Legate.” “For in no land are the folk of so many different minds as in England; and if I committed him to one, the others, you may be sure, would be envious.” “If the land be not defended by the Pope at the present juncture, then I know not who should defend it.” To this they all agreed. So when the King, the Legate and the great men came again, “the Marshal raised himself on his side, and called the King, and took him by the hand, and said to the Legate: ‘Sir, I have thought long and carefully about what we spoke of yesterday. I will commit my lord here into the Hand of God, and into the hand of the Pope, and into yours, you being here in the Pope’s stead.’ Then he said to the King: ‘Sir, I pray the Lord God that, if I have ever done anything that pleased Him, He may grant you to be a brave and good man; and if you should go astray in the footsteps of any evil ancestor and become like to such, then I pray God, the Son of Mary, that He give you not long life, but grant you to die at once.’ ‘Amen,’ answered the King.” Another attack of pain seems to have compelled the Marshal again hurriedly to dismiss the assembly: but he at once sent his eldest son after them, that he might formally deliver the King, “in the sight of the baronage,” to the Legate, in order that no man should be able to say this thing was done in a corner. The young Marshal fulfilled his commission; taking the King by the hand, “in the sight of all he offered him to the Legate. But the Bishop of Winchester sprang up and took the child by the head. ‘Let be, my Lord Bishop!’ said the young Marshal, ‘concern yourself not with this matter; I wish it to be seen that I fulfill all my father’s command.’” The Legate rose up to receive the King, and sternly rebuked Peter.[516] The old Marshal, feeling, as he said “delivered from a great burden,” lingered for some weeks longer, and died on 14th May, conscious to the last, in the act of making the sign of the cross.[517] Earls, barons, bishops, abbots, joined the funeral train as it passed from Caversham to London; and with every imaginable token of honour and reverence from clerks and laymen alike, the Marshal was laid to rest, as he had desired, in the church of the Knights of the Temple; Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury taking the chief part in the burial service and paying the last honours to the man whom he too, as he stood by the open grave, declared to have been “the best knight of all the world that has lived in our time.”[518] FOOTNOTES: