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“Je suis voix au desert criant
Que chascun soyt rectifiant
La voye de Sauveur; non suis,
Et accomplir je ne le puis.”

ANNE OF BOHEMIA HAS ONE ONLY FRIEND,
AND BY HIM PLAYS THE FRIEND’S PART; AND
ACHIEVES IN DOING SO THEIR COMMON ANGUISH, AS WELL
AS THE CONFUSION OF STATECRAFT AND THE POULTICING
OF A GREAT DISEASE.

In the year of grace 1381 (Nicolas begins) was Dame Anne magnificently fetched from remote Bohemia, and at Westminster married to Sire Richard, the second monarch of that name to reign in England. The Queen had presently noted a certain priest who went forbiddingly about her court, where he was accorded a provisional courtesy, and more forbiddingly into many hovels, where day by day a pitiful wreckage of humanity both blessed and hoodwinked him, as he morosely knew, and adored him, as he never knew at all.

Queen Anne made inquiries. This young cleric was amanuensis to the Duke of Gloucester, she was informed, and notoriously a by-blow of the Duke’s brother, the dead Lionel of Clarence. She sent for this Edward Maudelain. When he came her first perception was, “How wonderful his likeness to the King!” while the thought’s commentary ran, unacknowledged, “Ay, as an eagle resembles a falcon!” For here, to the observant eye, was a more zealous person, already passion-wasted, and ineffably a more dictatorial and stiff-necked being than the lazy and amiable King; also, this Maudelain’s face and nose were somewhat too long and high; and the priest was, in a word, the less comely of the pair by a very little, and by an infinity the more kinglike.

“You are my cousin now, messire,” she told him, and innocently offered to his lips her own.

He never moved; but their glances crossed, and for that instant she saw the face of a man who has just stepped into a quicksand. She trembled, without knowing why. Then he spoke, composedly, and of trivial matters.

Thus began the Queen’s acquaintance with Edward Maudelain. She was by this time the loneliest woman in the island. Her husband granted her a bright and fresh perfection of form and color, but desiderated any appetizing tang, and lamented, in his phrase, a certain kinship to the impeccable loveliness of some female saint in a jaunty tapestry; bright as ice in sunshine, just so her beauty chilled you, he complained: and moreover, this daughter of the Caesars had been fetched into England, chiefly, to breed him children, and this she had never done. Undoubtedly he had made a bad bargain–he was too easy-going, people presumed upon it. His barons snatched their cue and esteemed Dame Anne to be negligible; whereas the clergy, finding that she obstinately read the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, under the irrelevant plea of not comprehending Latin, denounced her from their pulpits as a heretic and as the evil woman prophesied by Ezekiel.

It was the nature of this desolate child to crave affection, as a necessity almost, and pitifully she tried to purchase it through almsgiving. In the attempt she could have found no coadjutor more ready than Edward Maudelain. Giving was with these downright two a sort of obsession, though always he gave in a half scorn but half concealed; and presently they could have marshalled an army of adherents, all in rags, who would cheerfully have been hacked to pieces for either of the twain, and have praised God at the final gasp for the privilege. It was perhaps the tragedy of the man’s life that he never suspected this.

Now in and about the Queen’s unfrequented rooms the lonely woman and the priest met daily to discuss now this or that comminuted point of theology, or now (to cite a single instance) Gammer Tudway’s obstinate sciatica. Considerate persons found something of the pathetic in their preoccupation by these trifles while, so clamantly, the dissension between the young King and his uncles gathered to a head: the air was thick with portents; and was this, then, an appropriate time, the judicious demanded of high Heaven, for the Queen of fearful England to concern herself about a peasant’s toothache?