CHAPTER XV
JOHN had been unperturbed, seemingly, while the Charter was being drawn up. Once it had been signed, he returned to Windsor Castle, locked himself in his room, and allowed the mask to drop. He indulged in the most prolonged tantrum of a lifetime, rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, bleating curses on the barons collectively and individually. This fit was followed by a period of intense thought and of long discussion with Pandulfo.
On the morning of Friday, June 26, John rode away from Windsor, accompanied by the papal legate. They went to Winchester, where the King stayed long enough to send letters to his agents in various cities, Ghent, Caen, Bordeaux, Naples, Genoa. He wanted these purveyors of flesh and blood, who were paid so much for each man delivered, to get him mercenaries, particularly the stout young men from the Low Countries and the German states around the Palatinate. He would pay well; nay, he would give them rich lands and houses and he would even turn over to their leaders the castles of his subjects when the defeat of the barons had been accomplished. Pandulfo started for Rome to let the Pope know what had befallen in England. This much done, John went to the Isle of Wight and waited there for his plans to mature. His pride had been so affronted that he did not want to face his familiars and the courtiers and their wives until the score had been wiped off the slate.
Pandulfo had no difficulty in convincing Innocent that John should be supported in his struggle with the barons. He was a much misunderstood man, declared this oily and sinister go-between, a king who deserved, in reality, the affection of his subjects. The barons were concerned only with winning back their feudal power and, in resisting John, they were fighting against Holy Church. Thus Pandulfo. The Pope listened and was in complete accord with his agent.
Pope Innocent was a sick man, with only a few months to live. The crowning achievement of a lifetime devoted to the consolidation of the power of the Church had been the submission of John. It had been the first step, or so the Pontiff believed, toward the accomplishment of a great dream, the forming of a Christian empire of which the Pope would always be the head. Innocent conceived himself the temporal as well as the apostolic leader of the English state and saw the uprising of the barons as a repudiation of his authority. Under the circumstances he decided that prompt and sweeping steps were indicated. The hand which had hurled so many thunderbolts was raised again.
On August 24 Innocent issued a bull annulling the Charter. It was sharp in its condemnation of the national cause and ended with the words:
We can no longer pass over in silence such audacious wickedness, in contempt of the apostolic see, in infringement of the rights of the king.… We altogether quash the Charter and pronounce it to be, with all its obligations and guarantees, null and void.
At the same time he promulgated another bull, ordering the barons to lay down their arms in pain of excommunication.
Pandulfo returned with these powerful weapons as Stephen Langton was starting for Rome in the hope of convincing the Pope of the righteousness of the popular cause. The archbishop refused to publish the papal bulls and the agent triumphantly produced another by which Stephen Langton himself was suspended from office for a term of two years. This made it very clear that the waters at Rome had been most thoroughly muddied and that the only hope left was to see the Pope and convince him he had acted on false information. Accordingly Langton boarded the ship which had been waiting for him and started on the two-month journey to Italy.
It was a logical step to take and yet, as events shaped themselves, it brought the cause of the people close to disaster. Langton was unable to make any impression on Innocent. While he kicked his heels in impotence in unfriendly anterooms, the barons in England, lacking his wise leadership, were soon at odds with each other. They permitted John to gain the upper hand in the civil war which ensued. That the King lost in the end was due to his capacity for making mistakes greater even than those for which Robert Fitz-Walter and his badly organized Army of God and Holy Church were responsible.
Langton was coldly received in Rome. His fellow cardinals turned their backs on him, and it was a long time before he was allowed an audience with the Pontiff. Innocent was harsh and accusatory with the man on whom he had once lavished his highest favors. The archbishop faced the torrent of censure with admirable calm and an unbending will to stand by the cause he had espoused and led. They parted in anger, and from that moment the papal doors were closed to the Englishman.
The situation came to a head amid a scene of great magnificence. The Fourth Lateran Council, summoned by the Pope, marked the apex of apostolic power which had been achieved during his pontificate and which would never again be equaled. The heads of the Church attended from all parts of Christendom, from as far east as Antioch and as far west as Iceland, coming by ship when possible and laboring over mountain passes and rocky roads to reach the center of the world, the Eternal City. When this brilliant assembly opened, there were present all the cardinals and apostolic officers, 412 bishops, 800 heads of monastic orders, as well as innumerable priors and sub-priors, and representatives from every ruler in Europe. John had sent the abbot of Beaulieu, Thomas de Huntington, and Geoffrey de Crowcombe as his deputies, with very special instructions to look well after his interests. Never before had so many miters been seen at one time, and so many wise and kindly faces under them (and some that were harsh and dictatorial and simoniacal and nepotistic), nor such a combination of the rich vestments of the high churchmen with the simple brown and gray robes of the monkish heads.
Stephen Langton, under the disgrace of suspension, was not allowed to attend as a delegate. He sat among the spectators and, having human weaknesses as well as other men, suffered much distress of mind because of his exclusion. Letters that he wrote at the time to friends in England show how low he had fallen in spirit. He thought seriously of surrendering his high rank as cardinal and archbishop and joining the order of the Carthusians, one of the most rigid of all monastic orders. If he had joined the English Charterhouse at Witham, he would have spent the rest of his life in seclusion and contemplation, existing in poverty and in tattered garb, eating one meal a day and never tasting meat. The opportunity that eremitical life offered for writing no doubt appealed to the disillusioned primate. He was much in the street of the Saxons, where the faces of fellow countrymen were often seen. Here stood St. Mary’s Church which a Saxon king had built.
He was present when the situation in England came up for action but was neither allowed to speak nor to introduce any explanation of what had happened. Crowded among the spectators at one side, he heard himself denounced as a troublemaker and the barons scored as disobedient vassals.
The assembled leaders of the Church had come to Rome with certain grave problems to solve, particularly the growth of heretical opinion. The creeds of the Cathari and the Waldenses were to be crushed, the crusade against the Albigenses in southern France to be strengthened, the first development within the Church of a form of inquisition to be declared. With all this on their hands they paid little attention to the trouble in the island over which the Pontiff had assumed suzerainty. They did not have the least inkling that something sublime had happened in England, that the spirit of liberty, after lying in chains through the long, icy centuries of the Dark Ages, had begun to stir. With unanimity they confirmed the suspension of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury and voted into effect the excommunication of the barons who had not obeyed the Pope by laying down their arms.
Pope Innocent presided over this famous Council with the mark of death on his face and wasted figure. He was so ill that for many days he had not been able to eat any food but oranges, and it was doubted if his strength would carry him through. The exultation of this official climax to his supreme pontificate, however, enabled him to stand the fatigue. With glowing eyes he voiced his belief in the temporal superiority of the Church, in the words of the prophet, “Lo! I have set thee this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, and to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” His thin face was transfigured as he thus expressed his faith, and the Council stirred as one man and gave him its fervent approval. It did not enter the heads of the great leaders of the Church that, in their willingness to march behind his blazing chariot, they had stamped on the one constructive movement for the benefit of downtrodden humanity which had been started in centuries.
They created additional monastic orders, they decreed a new crusade, they agreed to pay a tithe of their revenues for this final effort to redeem the Holy Sepulcher, they reformed marriage laws and the rules of pilgrimage and appointment procedure. All this was proof of the firm will for progress which had brought them together. It was perhaps the fault of the age in which they lived that they condemned Magna Charta without any serious consideration.
The excitement of the Lateran Council had been a heavy tax on the small store of strength left in the worn frame of the Pope. He survived the winter months, but when the heat of summer began, he found it necessary to seek some amelioration of his sufferings in the hills. He went first to Viterbo, then to Orvieto, and finally reached Perugia. Here word came to him that Louis of France had landed with an army in England. Perhaps he realized then that the ambitions of kings could not be curbed and bridled by apostolic decree and that the walls of power he had been raising were doomed to tumble as soon as his firm hand was withdrawn. He fell into a coma and died within a few days.
In the meantime the man who had been chiefly responsible for Magna Charta remained under suspension and could not leave Rome. He existed in the shadow of papal disapproval, compelled to watch developments in England from afar. He continued to fret in exile while the cause of liberty passed through many stages of serious crisis.
2
John threw off the mask as soon as his reinforcements began to pour into the country. He came out of his hiding place, roaring for revenge on the men who had humbled him. He struck first at Rochester, which William d’Aubigny, a descendant of beautiful Queen Adelicia, was holding for the barons. The routiers were nominally under the command of John, but the generalship of the siege was supplied by Savaric de Mauleon who, as has been made clear before, was as deft at composing a chanson as cracking a skull. The royal force was a rare collection of cutthroats, all of them boasting such names as Mauger the Murderer, Ivo the Iron-hearted, and Dennis the Damned. Their work won for them collectively the title of Satan’s Guards.
D’Aubigny held out bravely. He stayed the arm of an archer who was aiming at the King and who protested that he wanted to rid the country of “our bloody enemy.” “Hold thy hand,” said the commander. “Strike not this evil beast whose fate is in God’s decision.”
The garrison did not give in until the food had been consumed. John, more savage in victory than in defeat, would have hanged them all, starting with the fair Queen’s descendant, but Savaric de Mauleon pointed out the folly of such a course. The war had but started and there were many more battles to be fought, some of which they might lose. If the garrison were hanged, the King’s own mercenaries might expect the same fate in the event of a reverse. If the King wanted to keep them under his banners, he must not initiate a policy of mutual extermination. Grumblingly the King gave in.
The barons seemed incapable of organizing themselves again. The action of the Pope had been a serious blow to them and had resulted in many defections. The absence of Langton left them as rudderless as a ship adrift. They did nothing to stop the ramping, triumphant King when he swept England from the Channel to the borders of Scotland. John carried fire and sword with him and turned the green countryside into a blackened wilderness. It was his amiable habit to apply the torch himself each morning to the house where he had spent the night. This unbalanced ruler, who had earned the name of John Softsword when fighting the French, became a regular lion when he faced scattered levies. How bold he was, how sharp and vicious the sword he now wielded!
The barons, bold enough as individuals, were a futile lot in combination. Lacking leadership, they were unable to check the monarch they had humbled at Runnymede. The best they could think of doing in this crisis was to appeal to France for help! The request was made to Prince Louis because his wife, Blanche of Castile, was next in line to the English throne if John and his brood were thrown aside. As Louis was heir to the throne of France, the ultimate result of this step would have been the union of the two countries and the further subjugation of the English people. That the barons were able to contemplate and even favor such a result is an indication of the panic into which they had fallen.
This was late in 1215 and Pope Innocent was still alive. He thundered protests and threatened to place an interdict on France if the invitation of the barons was accepted. The young prince listened to his wife, who was urging him to support her pretensions to the throne of England, and refused to listen to the papal threats. King Philip, however, could not afford to antagonize Rome, and a council was called to debate the matter.
The papal legate, Gualo, was invited to attend and he protested against French interference in a country which was a fief of Rome. He made much of the fact that John had taken the cross, declaring that the English King would lead an army to the Holy Land as soon as the trouble with his barons had been settled.
Philip was a model of discretion all through the deliberations. Wearing a surcoat of the sky blue he seemed to prefer, and with his arms crossed on his gigantic chest, he chose his words with the utmost care, keeping a wary eye on the legate the while. He avowed himself a devout subject of His Holiness and unwilling to do anything hostile to Rome. At the same time, he said, his son had an undoubted claim to the English crown and his right to accept the invitation of the barons must be given due consideration.
As though this were a signal, various knights in the train of the prince took the floor in turn and argued that the murder of Arthur had disqualified John and that accordingly the throne of England was vacant. The prince followed with an impassioned speech in which he expressed himself as free in so far as England was concerned to make his own decision. It had already been made, it seemed, for the young man declared his intention of sailing against John with or without his father’s permission. This brought Philip into the lists. Father and son had a heated dispute, at the end of which the prince turned and stalked from the council.
The proceedings smack of play-acting, as though the King had decided he must make a show of obeying the Pope while secretly in accord with his son. The chief actors in the farce had been so carefully coached, however, that the breach between father and son seemed real. For a very short time: almost immediately the masks were removed and the work of preparation for the invasion of England began.
Innocent knew he was being tricked. With the signs of death on his face and frail form, he preached in Rome from the text, “The sword, the sword is drawn!” He was bitter in his denunciation of France and equally critical of father and son. Stephen Langton sat in the church and listened to the words which condemned England to more civil war, realizing that the people would be the losers no matter which side won. Perhaps, being human, he felt some sardonic satisfaction at the situation in which the Pope found himself involved.
Louis proceeded to assemble a large army and to gather in the ports of northern France a fleet of nearly one thousand vessels to transport the troops across the Sleeve. Such preparation would not have been possible without the approval and cooperation of the King. The knights of France rallied to the cause, swearing the usual oaths—to abstain from cutting their hair or beards, from bathing, from the favors of women—until the conquest of England had been completed. Eustace the Monk was secured to command the naval operations, and this was a costly appointment. Eustace was a monk turned pirate and a villain of such deep dye that he deserves to rank among the greatest freebooters of all time, with Barbarossa, no less, or with Avery, Morgan and Madame Ching. The flag of France waved over the camps and fluttered at the mastheads of the ships. The period of play-acting was over.
When Louis landed on the Kentish coast, John retreated from his camp back of Dover. The French by-passed Dover, where stout Hubert de Burgh was in command, and marched up to London. Here many of the barons swore fealty to Louis.
England was now in a sorry plight, for the contest offered no choice of sides to the people. They lost either way. The French prince made no effort to conceal the chains he held behind his back. Every castle taken by this worthy son of the grasping, insatiable Philip was promptly given to one of his own followers. He paid no attention to the barons on whose invitation he had come and was quite prepared to confiscate all their holdings. One of his followers, the Vicomte de Melune, confessed on his deathbed that Louis had sworn to drive into exile every man who had been at Runnymede as traitors to a king.
The difficulties of the situation had become painfully clear to Englishmen.
3
It was in mid-October. A wind was blowing from the north and driving the rack across the sky so briskly that the small, hurrying clouds changed shape each moment. Whenever this kind of weather came, people would look up and say, The Abbot of Abbots is calling the Gray Monks home, meaning that there would be a storm.
All day long John and his troops had been moving up from Weisbeck with the intention of crossing the sands where the Welland River, then known as the Willestrem, emptied into the Fossdyke Wash. The impatient King, in spite of his gout which made it necessary for him to ride with one leg in a sling, had stayed in the van, waving his followers on to greater efforts and cursing the snail’s pace with which they responded. He had forgotten that an armed force can travel no faster than the slowest of its supply wagons. He had not only insisted on a long train of them for the conveyance of arms and provisions and, it was whispered, of his gold and treasure, but he had refused to allow the wagons to be separated from the main body.
As he had grown older the King had become more and more like his father in one respect. He could not stay still. He wanted always to be on the move, never remaining anywhere longer than one night. With his kingdom in danger, he was more restless than ever.
John had some of the qualities of generalship which he called upon when hard pressed. His position now was desperate and he had been attempting its betterment with bold strokes. The proper strategy of defense was to contain the French army within the small corner it held of the southeast. To do this he had broken his army into units and placed them in garrison along the line of the Thames, at Windsor, Wallingford, Oxford. His next objective was to break communications between the invaders and the strong counties of the north, where the opposition to him was most marked. He had daringly struck north of London, leaving the land behind him, as always, black and desolate. He had scored some successes, and now here he was, marching with a relatively small body of troops along the approaches to The Wash.
No matter how insistently the King might ride ahead, he never allowed himself to get out of sight of the lumbering vehicles. He cantered or galloped with his head cocked aslant so that he could keep them in view. Sometimes he waited for them to come up so he could ask questions of the drivers and demand increased vigilance of the rear guard. It was clear that he was uneasy and suspicious.
He had the best of reasons for his uneasiness. Being cautious as well as parsimonious, he had never believed it safe to leave his treasure in one place. His gold and precious jewels had been entrusted to the care of monasteries in different parts of the country. Late in June he had sent letters to sixteen bishops and abbots, instructing them to forward at once everything they had been holding for him. From Rufford and Bindon and Merton and Waltham had come well-guarded stores. The King had carried his treasure with him from that time on, even on his campaigns.
Although the royal regalia was legally supposed to be stored in the vaults at Winchester, John had preferred to keep the outward symbols of his kingship with him; and so, on this raw and windy day as he progressed slowly toward the crossing of The Wash, the crown and scepter and orb of England were concealed somewhere in that long tail of creaking wagons. Also there was the regalia which the Empress Matilda had smuggled out of Germany, including the crown she had worn and the sword of Tristan. It has been estimated from lists supplied by the monasteries that he had in addition a great accumulation of costly articles. There were cups of gold and white silver to the number of nearly two hundred, many of them richly jeweled. There were goblets and flagons and standing cups and mazers. There were rings, jeweled belts, pendants (one containing a pregnant stone, so called because there was a smaller stone inside it), and a seemingly endless assortment of gold crosses, clasps, thuribles (ornamented with towers and castles in the Gothic manner), bedewin stones, unset rubies and emeralds and sapphires.
It is not to be wondered at that his journeyings were a constant torment to the King and that he supervised personally the packing and unpacking of the canvas-covered wagons.
The tide had not started to rise perceptibly when they reached the sandy shallows where the river flowed into The Wash. John was convinced they could cross safely and he was the first to urge his horse into the water. He had decided to spend the night at Swineshead, a Cistercian monastery more than ten miles to the north, and nothing else would suit him. Accordingly he gestured impatiently for his men to follow him. The guards came first, splashing through the water and then galloping up the sands to the higher ground beyond. The rest of the troops crossed as briskly as they could, and it seemed certain that the whole train would get over before the tide imposed any serious barrier.
What the King did not know—and none of his advisers seemed aware of it either—was that the twice-a-day meeting of fresh and salt water sometimes became a struggle of homeric proportions. The pleasant bickering sound of the river would turn into a furious roar when it encountered the inward thrust of the sea. There would be threshing and tossing and angry whirling, converting the ford into a maelstrom.
It was almost as though the forces of heaven and earth watched, as they had done once before at the crossing of the Red Sea by the children of Israel, and waited for the exact moment to strike. Although the tide was on the rise, John shouted an order to the wagon train to come on. The drivers obeyed and the wheels began to grind their way into the wet sand. One by one the wagons entered the water, the horses urged on by loud shouts and the cracking of whips. Then, as they had done when the Egyptians pursued the fleeing Israelites, the waters came rushing in at the outstent line. The swirling flood rose to the hubs, then to the tops of the wheels. It was too late for the wagons to turn. Was it too late for them to get through?
The strong current of the river accepted the challenge of the sea and the jousting began. The King saw his wagons engulfed with a suddenness which seemed incredible. There were mad cries for help from the drivers and the shrill screeching of horses fighting to get free of harness. And then, in a matter almost of seconds, the whole train vanished from sight. Such a thing was impossible—and yet it had happened! The crown and the scepter of England and the regalia of Matilda had been lost to sight and washed away by the furious waters. The fabulous sword of Tristan, minus the splinter of steel which had been left in the skull of the giant Morôlt, would never be seen again.
The blow which nature had dealt him left the King speechless. This, he knew, was the end of everything. What use now the exactions of a lifetime, the endless taxes which had driven his subjects to rebellion, the theft of a brother’s legacies, the pulling of teeth from helpless Jews! Every coin which had not been doled out painfully to Mauger the Murderer and Ivo the Ironhearted was gone, tossed about in wagons which would soon disintegrate and scatter the treasure on the bottom of the North Sea. He had no gold left now to pay his mercenaries. He was tired and ill. The uneven struggle could not be continued.
Turning his horse without a word, John rode up the grade to the northern road. In an unbroken silence he galloped to Swineshead. Here he was given a lukewarm welcome, for he was always at odds with the Cistercians over the sums he demanded from them, and proceeded to eat a heavy meal, ending with a dish of late peaches and a tankard of ale. He became ill almost immediately and loudly declared that the monks had poisoned him.
Later the story spread that one of the staff had put the blood of a toad in the ale and, being forced by the King to drink of it first, had gone out to the garden and died immediately, the whole region of his weasand becoming black and corrupt from the virulence of the poison. This was one of the wild stories which invariably grow out of tragedies in high places.
It is true, however, that the King called for a horse litter and went on that night, in a raging fever and acute pain, to Sleaford. It was raining the next morning, but he insisted on continuing the journey. At midday he was so weak that he almost fell from his saddle and had to finish the distance in a horse litter. He groaned and cried out with the pain but would not allow a stop to be made until they reached Newark and he was taken to the palace of the Bishop of Lincoln.
On the way from Sleaford the mind of the King had been constantly on his loss. He had moaned and ground his teeth and cursed the day he was born. But when they laid his sick bones on a bed in a tower from which there was a view of the Trent and of the country beyond, he subsided and had nothing more to say.
The King was dying. The abbot of Croxton, who was a wise man with herbs and bloodlettings, was brought to attend him. After one glance at the inert form and the livid cheeks, the abbot turned to the royal servants clustered in a silent group and shook his head. There was nothing to be done for John of England.
Nature took a most active part in the last hours of the wicked King’s life. The storm promised by the scurrying Gray Monks had arrived the day before with flurries of wind and rain. Now it took the form of a gale, roaring down from the north and howling about the tower of the bishop’s palace. Everyone knew that such winds were sent for one purpose, to carry off souls, and the servants hastily bolted shutters over the linen frames in the windows. This did no good, for nothing could keep out the sound or conceal the purpose of the blasts from the ears of the dying King. John accepted the inevitable with more resignation than he had ever been known to show, speaking occasionally in a low voice and eagerly welcoming the bishop, who administered the last rites. He dictated a statement which was all he left in the way of a will, the only important clause it contained being the appointment to the guardianship of his son and heir Henry of the only man he thoroughly trusted, William Marshal; a confidence which that stout veteran justified soon thereafter by the expedition with which he relieved England of the French threat.
4
When a king is dying, the world about him stands still. The lashing rain could not keep the curious people of the neighborood from leaving the counter and bench and plow and gathering at the gates of the bishop’s palace. They even wedged themselves into the courtyard and stood about in soggy discomfort, whispering among themselves and staring up at the lights in the tower windows, the wind blowing their horn-peaked caps into fantastic shapes. Respect for death is one of the deepest of instincts, and there was no tendency to decry the man who was passing or speak of his wickedness.
The castle was filled to overflowing. The knights who had arrived in the King’s train remained in a body, a grim and uneasy lot. All of them knew the decision they faced, on which their possessions and perhaps their lives depended; whether to remain under the royal banner and fight for a nine-year-old boy or to go over to the other side and fight with the French invader. Each man eyed his neighbor suspiciously; they spoke seldom, and briefly; they watched the door behind which the King was dying, and waited.
There were the captains of mercenaries also, who were in a still sharper dilemma, for it was doubtful if any of them could hope to escape from England with whole skins. Every man’s hand would be against Mauger and Ivo and Dennis as soon as the last breath left the body of the laboring King. They should have departed before this, but there was pay owing to them and they perhaps hoped the new King would have need of them. There were churchmen of all degrees, as wary and expectant as the men in arms. The policy of Innocent had chained them to the cause of John, but now the strong Pope was dead, and the future was a void into which even a powerful bishop could not gaze without uncertainty and dread. One thing was certain: this was a case where there would be no demand for deodand; unless they wanted to distrain on the waters of The Wash and the Willestrem and the sands of the Fossdyke. It would have been a profitless venture, for the only part of John’s treasure which was ever recovered was a round and rusted article on which a peasant stumbled while bowel-deep in the water and later sold to a peddler for a farthing. It was of gold and shaped like a crown but so small that it had certainly never rested on the broad pate of John of England. More likely it was the top of a standing cup. Everything else was lost.
There were droves of men of lesser degree: spies from the northern reaches of Ermine Street (parts of which are now incorporated in the Great North Road) who had come to report on baronial strength and activities; contractors who had arrived in the expectation of selling sheep and beeves to the royal forces; clyster-pipes, as doctors were popularly called because of their method of affording bodily relief, all of them with miraculous cures which would bring recovery to the King and fame to them; and the usual mysterious individuals who refused to divulge anything about themselves. A self-seeking lot: it almost seemed as though every man in England who had reason for wishing John to live had found his way to the tall and glum castle of the Bishop of Lincoln.
None of them had any hope left. They paced about and muttered among themselves and pounced on every royal servant who emerged from the inner rooms. They listened apprehensively to the wind which seemed to be growing more violent. It was after the most demanding blast, which tore at the shutters and roared over the battlements, that the abbot of Croxton appeared in the doorway and made the sign of the cross.
The abbot embalmed the body and it was taken to Worcester. Here John was buried in accordance with his last instructions beside the bier of good St. Wulfstan, clothed in the white robe and red cross of a Crusader. John had had no illusions about himself. He knew how sinful he had been and he believed, as all men did, that the devil prowled about new-made graves for the souls he could claim as his own. The dead King wanted to be well disguised when the odor of brimstone filled his tomb and the long satanic fingers came prying at his winding sheet.