The Knights of the White Rose, etc

Front matter

the KNIGHTS OF THE WHITE ROSE PRINTED DY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON "For Love and Loyalty!" P. 21. THE KNIGHTS OF THE WHITE ROSE. Frontispiece. THE KNIGHTS OF THE ' For I, though a Peer of England, and the hearer of a name that was old when Magna \Y/ I—I 1 i p Y< (| p v^^ Charta was signed, have been in my time not only a soldier of fortune, but an exile and an outlaw with a price on my head. I have fought under foreign flags in wars that were no quarrels of mine. I have been rich and poor, rebel and loyal, and I have known what it is to stand in the sunshine of royal favour at court and to sit BY GEORGE GRIFFITH AUTHOR OF \C-. (THE ANGEL OF THE REVOLUTION' ( OLGA ROMANOFF* ' THE OUTLAWS OF THE AIR* ' VALDAR THE OFT-BORN* (BRITON OR BOER?' 'THE ROMANCE OF GOLDEN STAR' ETC. fettered in a prison cell under the shadow of the scaffold.

I have been a lover without a sweetheart, and a husband without a wife — front which you may guess that the changeful stars under which I must have been born have seen fit to play some strange pranks with my destiny,'' WITH ILLUSTRATIONS LY HAL HURST LONDON F. V. WHITE & CO, 14 BEDFORD STREET, STRAND, W.C. l897 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE

Prologue

1 I. FOR LOVE AND LOYALTY 15 II. FATE'S FIRST FROWN ....... . . . 23 III. HOW WE CAME TO THE IRISH WAR . . .34 IV. TO THE RESCUE 44 V. HOW WE FOUGHT IN THE BURNING HOUSE 51 VI. HOW WE CHEATED THE FLAMES . . . . 06 VII. BEFORE THE WALLS OF DERRY .... 74 VIII. THE FIGHT BY THE GATE 87 IX. THE BATTLE OF THE WALL 97 X. THE MARTYRS OF DERRY 107 XI. WITH THE ENEMY IN THE GATE . . . .116 XII. LOVE IN WAR 1-6 XIII. HOW KENNETH FIRED THE MORTAR . . .135 XIV. SOME TALK AND A NEW ENTERPRISE . . . . 145 XV. HOW WE FARED UP THE RIVER . . . .15 4 XVI. HOW ADAM MURRAY CAME TO CAMP . . . . 163 XVII. A LETTER AND ITS ANSWER 171 XVIII. HOW DERRY WAS DELIVERED 179 XIX. FROM DERRY TO DUNDALK ..... 186 XX. FROM BLACKWATER TO THE BOYNE . . . . vi The Knights of the White Rose CHAPTER TAGE XXI. ON THE MORN OF BATTLE 204 XXII.

HOW BOYNE WATER RAN RED 213 XXIII. AFTER THE GREAT DEFEAT 223 XXIV. A PILGRIMAGE OF LOVE 231 XXV. IN STRANGE COMPANY 215 XXVI. HOW WE CROSSED THE NARROW SEA. . . . -54 XXVII. FOR KING OR HONOUR ? 2G 4 XXVIII. BETWEEN TWO KINGS . . . . . . 274 XXIX. A KING AND TWO KNAVES 282 XXX. IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLOCK . . . . 292 XXXI. FROM THE SHADOW TO THE SUNLIGHT . . .300

Epilogue

. . LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS for love and loyalty Frontispiece ' PERCHED HER ON MY SHOULDER . . . AND STARTED OFF AT A CANTER DOWN THE WALK ' . . . .0 face p. 10 THEY SAW ME SLIP HAND OVER HAND DOWN THE ROPE ., 73 HE DROVE HIS PISTOL MUZZLE UNDER HIS CHIN . ,, 220 IF YOU SURRENDER I WILL PUT A COUPLE OF BULLETS THROUGH YOUR HEAD .... „ 256 WITH HER SWEET LIPS UPTURNED, EXPECTANT OF THE KISSES THEY HAD WAITED SO LONG FOR „ i THE KNIGHTS OF THE WHITE ROSE

PROLOGUE.

A BOY AND-GIEL IDYLL The pen is but a dull, unwieldy implement in a hand that is more accustomed to the feel of a sword-hilt or a pistol-butt, and now that I have at last resolved to set in earnest about the telling of this story of mine, it is but the plain truth that I scarce know how to begin. I have ridden many a difficult course at the head of my gallant Knights of the White Rose, those brave, gay-hearted champions of a lost cause, of whose doings I am going to tell you. I have charged through storms of bullets and iron tempests of cannon shot, and I have hewn my way through lines and squares of bayonetedged infantry on many a desperately disputed field; but all that looks easier now to me than does the way of my halting pen over these fair, smooth-looking sheets of paper that are lying before me, waiting to receive the written shapes of the thoughts and memories that are crowding in upon me from the busy and stormful years of my past youth and manhood.

B For I, though a peer of England, and the bearer of a name that was old when Magna Charta was signed, have been in my time not only a soldier of fortune, but an exile and an outlaw with a price on my head. I have fought under foreign flags in wars that were no quarrels of mine. I have been rich and poor, rebel and loyal, and have known what it is to stand in the sun shine of royal savour at Court, and sit fettered in a prison cell under the shadow of the scaffold. I have been a lover without a sweetheart, and a husband with out a wife, from which you may guess that the change ful stars under which I must have been born have seen fit to play some strange pranks with my destiny. But here, methinks, you have enough preamble, which you must set down to the fault of this unpractised pen, which, like a wayward, half-broken horse, seems ready to bolt ere the journey is well begun.

However rough and rudely chequered with ill-fortune that portion of my life of which I shall have to tell you may have been, no life could have had a beginning much brighter and fuller of fair promise than mine. Looking back through the gathering mists of the stormy years that have gone by since then, I see the early sun of a perfect July morning shining on a smooth green English lawn that slopes away from a low terrace in front of an old, high-roofed, many-gabled mansion down to the green banks of a smooth winding stream that flows quietly under the shade of stately, over-arching trees, and out of that into long, broad reaches, through flat meadow-lands and rustling cornfields, eastward to the sea, lying . miles away — a long, narrow band of glittering silver that looks like a bright dividing line between earth and sky.

Prologue 3 At the end of the lawn there is an old grey moss grown bridge which spans the stream in a single high pitched arch, and as the young sunlight of that lovely summer morning breaks through the twilight of the years that part it from the evening of to-day, I see a tall, loose limbed, and yet not ill-shaped or ill-favoured lad standing in the middle of the bridge, leaning his arms on the parapet and looking out over the fair landscape towards the sea with eyes dreamy and bright with the golden visions of youth— and well do I remember how bright those visions were. How could they be other than bright, for was not this my wedding morning, the wedding morning of a lad of sixteen with a little bright-haired, soft-eyed maiden of twelve, who had been his sweetheart ever since the two of them had learnt how pleasant a game it was to kiss and play at lovers, as older people did, and hide in cosy corners of rooms or wander along quiet shady paths with hands clasped and arms entwined, and childish lips saying between the kisses very much the same sort of sweet nonsense that older lips have said since the world began, and will go on saying as long as the generations of men follow each other upon the earth ?

It was of this, and of the day's doings, and of all that was to follow them, as I hoped, in the after years, that I was thinking as I stood watching the shadows of the little white clouds chasing each other over field and stream, and waiting for some one who would soon be co'ning down the lawn to help me to turn my thoughts into words. Now as this story of mine will not be read for many a long year after the hand that is writing it has B2 mouldered into the grave-dust, and as men and manners may have changed much by that time, it will be well for me to explain how this state of things, this waiting of a bridegroom of sixteen for a bride of twelve, came about, and the explanation of it is this. The lad on the bridge was Eustace Ferrers, Earl of Harlestone, Peer of the Realm, and the last living scion of a long line of soldiers and statesmen who had ruled the broad domains which stretched away along the Norfolk coast since the days when William the Norman gave them, with the hand of a fair-haired Saxon princess, to one of the starkest of the knights who had won honour and riches on the hard-fought field of Hastings.

My father and mother were both dead. My mother had died but a few days after she had given life to me, her only child, and four years afterwards my father was found dead, murdered, with a rapier-thrust through his heart from the back to the breast in a thickly-wooded part of the park at Harlestone. Since this time I had been a ward of the Crown, and in the ordinary course of things should have remained so until my twenty-first birthday. Now it so happened that, while the domains of Harlestone touched the southern borders of Norfolk, those of the Earls of Minsmere ran from the sea inland and joined them on the northern boundaries of Suffolk, and even as I was last in the direct line of Harlestone so my little sweet heart and maiden wife that was to be that day, Muriel, Lady Alden, daughter and only child of the last Earl of Minsmere,'who had been brought home with a broken neck from the hunting-field while she was yet a baby in long clothes, was heiress of all the lands of Minsmere, and a countess in her own right.

Thus, as you will Prologue 5 see, it would have been hard to find a pair of sweethearts — and I have told you that we had been that almost since we could walk — on whose loves the Fates seemed to smile more kindly than they did on ours. Lord and lady of broad and fair domains and fat acres which ran north and south, one into the other, rich with goodly rent-rolls and the ever-growing hoardings that were mounting up against our coming of age, sweethearts already and to be married to-day by the policy of those who, perchance, thought more of joining our lands than they did of uniting our hearts, did you ever hear of an English boy and girl whose lives looked brighter than ours did then ? There was, indeed, but a single shadow on them, and that was but a trifle of our own imagining and lack of wisdom.

Had we had our own childish way I verily believe that, with all the courage of innocent ignorance, we should have gone into housekeeping there and then, as many a time before we had played at doing, and taken the hard, sober work of the world and the grim realities of life for granted, after the wont of many a pair of wedded lovers who have had but a few years the advantage of us. But, as I need hardly tell you, the maturer wisdom of our guardians had duly provided against such impos sible foolishness as this. Though man and wife in the eyes of the law and the Church, we were yet, by the terms of the marriage contract, to remain man and wife in name only until I had reached my legal majority. On my twenty-first birthday my little Muriel would, if she fulfilled her present promise, be a fair and stately maid of nearly eighteen summers, and on the morning of my birthday I was to go and claim her, and bring her back to the house of which she was henceforth to be mistress in deed as well as in name.

But meanwhile she was to remain under the wise and loving care of her mother, to be duly fitted for the life that lay before her, and taught how to live it in a fashion that would be worthy of her sweet self and the double rank that would be hers ; while I was to go to France, to the Court of the great Louis, to learn the profession of arms ; for there was peace in England then, but the armies of France, under Turenne and the great Conde, had raised the military glory of their country to its utmost height. After that I was to go to the wars in Germany and the Low Countries, and though I knew that our parting would be a sad one, yet I had already learned to look beyond it and picture the time when I should come back to claim my long-wedded bride, not such a callow, loose-limbed lad as was waiting for her there on the bridge, but a man and a soldier, strong and stalwart and bronzed, in the gay trappings of a captain of the French Guard, with long, spurred boots half-way up my legs, and a sword that I had really used on my hip, and, perhaps, with the decent beginnings of a moustache on my lip.

Now you know that the thoughts of a boy are like the winds that blow along the seashore, and so you may well believe that in my eyes the glory of such a home coming would be ample payment for the loss of my playmate and sweetheart for a few years. Tt has been well said that the things of the future are hidden from us in mercy. What should I have thought if, across the brightness of the visions that I was dreaming there on the bridge in the early morning of that 1st of July Prologue 7 in the Year of Grace 1685, there had been drawn the shadow of the dark reality that was to be, and I had seen myself coming tack to my native land like a thief stealing into a house at night, a rebel and an outlaw, landless and proscribed, with a price on my head, and no friend that I could trust save the good sword at my side and the pistols in my belt ?

Yes, it was well that I could see no farther and no truer than I did, for could I have done so my heart would not have leapt so lightly, nor my morning greet ing rung out so cheerily, nor my feet carried me eo swiftly away from the bridge and half-way up the lawn to meet the dainty little figure that was coming running over the still dewy grass as the clock in the western tower above the older part of the house was beginning to chime the half-hour after six. ' Good-morrow, my sweet countess ! ' I said, in my best courtier fashion, as, with less ceremony than I spoke with, I picked her up in my arms and kissed the lips that were so readily yielded to me. ' I have been waiting a good half-hour for you, and you know that time flies on leaden wings when a lover is waiting.' Truth to tell, it had taken me the greater part of the said half-hour to make this pretty speech ready for her, and lo ! when I said it it missed fire like a pistol with a damp priming, for I had scarcely got it off than my little lady-love's arms were tight round my neck, and she was giving me back my greeting kiss with such interest as made the saying of it somewhat diffi cult.

Still, I was not ill-pleased, for kisses are better than compliments any day, and say vastly more in a shorter time. Then, suddenly remembering that we were in the middle of the lawn in full view of all the front windows of the house, her little ladyship bethought herself of her dignity, which was greater for her years than her stature was, and began to struggle out of my arms, saying, with but a poor pretence at childish anger : ' Let me go, Eustace ! Put me down, I bid you. How do you know who may be watching us ? There, that is right. Now let us go down Lady Rosamund's Walk, and then you can kiss me again if you like. There won't be anyone looking there.' I had set her down now, after taking due toll for her release, and she smoothed out her rumpled little draperies, and walked along by my side as demurely as any eighteen-year-old miss under the eyes of her duenna until we had crossed the lawn and turned in among the trees, and then her little hand stole into my willing one, and she looked up at me and said with a saucy toss of her golden curls : ' But I'm not your countess quite yet, you know.

We are not married yet. And supposing mother was to change her mind, or I did ? ' ' Then,' I said with the most heroic resolve I could muster, ' I should go away to the French wars to morrow and get killed.' 'Then I won't change my mind, and if mamma changed hers, I would run away with you. Isn't that what grown-up people do when they won't let them get married? Eustace, shall we play at running away until it's time to go and get ready for the wedding ? ' ' Yes,' I said, catching her up in my arms again, and making off with her at full speed to the entrance of Lady Rosamund's Walk, a long shady, winding path, walled in by thick hedges, and roofed with great over arching trees, where, as the old story went, a long-dead Prologue 9 ancestress of my Lady Muriel's had been wont to meet her outlawed lover by night, and where she had seen him slain by her father and brothers.

After this she had duly mourned for him, and then married someone else who went to the Crusades and got killed, when she took to walking in the lane again, as rumour had it, to meet the ghost of her dead lover, until, to put an end to the scandal, the good Prior of Minsmere went into the walk at the dead of night with candle, bell, and book, and despatched the ghostly out law back to his proper limbo. We kept up our play till the bell rang at eight for breakfast, and you who are boys or girls and sweethearts yourselves will need no telling of what we said and did, and how we made all the pretty pretences of such a romance as children love to weave, in forecast of the sterner things that are to come. I was an outlaw, like Lady Rosamund's lover, and I had come from the forest to rescue my lady-love from the tyranny that kept us apart, and carry her away with me to my home amongst the greenwood, and she had yielded to my prayers, and taken pity on my heart and her own, leaving home and rank and wealth for sweet love's sake.

Then, just as I had lifted her to my saddle, which was on the trunk of a fallen tree in the park at the other end of the walk, we heard the bell ring, and remembered that the morning air had made us very hungry. We got down, and I, pretending that she must of necessity be wearied with all our running about, and the fatigues of the escape that our imaginations had made so hazardous, picked her up, and, in spite of the protests that she would have made more skilfully a few years later on, perched her on my shoulder, and, with my right arm holding her there, and hers round my neck, I started off at a canter through the walk, and then under the trees by the edge of the lawn I set her down, and we walked soberly back into real life and to our breakfasts. In spite of all the gay doings of that memorable day, I still remember that childish play of ours in the morning more distinctly and more pleasantly than what followed.

After breakfast we were marched off to be dressed, and, despite the pleasure of being decked out in such gallant finery as it was, I think we were both of us glad when it wras over. But after the dressing, when I thought that I was going to get at least another half-hour's love-making, though of a sedater sort than before, out of consideration for my embroidered velvet coat and satin waistcoat and her little ladyship's white silks and satins and laces and wondrously dressed hair, we were both of us sorely disappointed by a summons into the great reception room, where we were instructed for a good hour in the parts that we were to play together on our first public appearance in life. I don't know how many times we were married and remarried before we had got it all perfect, and by the time it was over we had both come to an agreement that if that was getting married it was very like lessons after all.

Indeed, there was only one part of it that we were not both heartily tired of before it was over, and that was the part of the marriage service where we had to kiss, and we kept mistaking the place where this came in until at last the rector, who was teaching us, told us to leave it out, and he would tell us the proper time. 10. Perched her on my shoulder . . . and started off at a canter down the walk. P. Prologue 11 Then we were rewarded with cake and sweetmeats and a little wine, and were told to sit down and keep quiet until the time came for us to go to church. We went and sat down at different ends of a sofa until the others got very busy with the marriage contracts and the preparations for the festivities that were to follow the wedding, and then I got up quietly and went behind a screen that stood across a corner of the room where I knew there were two nice big cushions, for I had put them there, and presently her ladyship followed me, and when they came to look for us they found us bill ing and cooing with just as much gravity and earnest ness as if we were really just going to be married — as of course, we were, only somehow we never seemed to look upon it as anything else than a very grand sort of play.

Then there came the procession across the park to the little priory church, where the girls of the village were waiting with baskets of flowers to strew along the path for us to walk over from the sloping roofed porch-gate of the churchyard up to the door of the church. I remember the flowers and the gay dresses of the people, the bright sunlight' and the clashing of the bells, and then standing before the altar beside Muriel and feeling now that it was really something more serious than a play. I remember, too, that I forgot nearly every word that they had taken so much pains to teach me, and that her little ladyship went demurely and quietly through it all with scarcely a mistake. I remember how we knelt together on the crimson velvet cushions and made those solemn promises to each other in our boy and girl voices, little recking of all that they were to mean to us some day.

And then at last it was over, and we stood up, and we went into the vestry, and I watched my little bride write in her childish hand, ' Muriel Ferrers, Countess of Harlestone,' underneath my big boyish scrawl. Then we went back into the church, and walked arm in-arm down the aisle while the organ roared and sang, and the bells clashed out again and the village people cheered as we came out into the open air again. After that came a very grand feast at the Priory, at which our healths and a great many others were drunk, and which lasted all the afternoon, as it seemed to us, longing as we were to get away and talk the whole thing over quietly by ourselves, as we considered a husband and wife ought certainly to have been allowed to do. At last my little countess got very sleepy, and her mother, the dowager, took pity on us and told me to take her away into her own boudoir and take care of her till bedtime, which I needed no second telling to do ; and so we went away and ensconced ourselves cosily on a sofa, and when, an hour or so afterwards, her maid came to take her to bed she found her with my arms round her waist and her head on my shoulder fast asleep, while I was doing my best to keep awake and guard her slumbers with the dignity proper to a newly wedded husband.

When she woke up we gave and took our good-night kisses as usual, and when she had gone away with her maid I got up and shook myself awake and went out into the park to think about it all and realise to myself that all our playing at being sweethearts, and man and wife, was now over, and that my little countess was now really my own, and I was hers, as I believed, for the rest of our lives, Prologue 13 My reverie was soon broken by a loud, not over steady voice calling to me from the terrace. I looked up and saw my cousin Markham coming down the steps towards me. This Markham was a lad of about my own age, the son of my father's younger brother, Baron of Rendham in Essex, in his mother's right, who had tried long and hard to mend the fortunes that he had shattered at play by procuring a marriage between Muriel and his son.

Markham and I had been rivals— or, I should rather say, he was pleased to con sider himself my rival, for Muriel had never dreamt of wavering in her childish faith and devotion, and, things being so, you may well believe that there was pretty bad blood between us. Of all the people in the world he was the one I least wanted to see or speak with then ; so, without heeding his call, I turned my back on him and walked away down the lawn. But he had had more wine at the wedding breakfast than was good for him, and didn't see the hint ; so he came down after me and, within ten yards of me, shouted a coarse jest about laggard husbands and waiting brides. I could have passed that by if Muriel's name had not been in it, but that set my blood on fire, and I turned round and said, I doubt not bombastically enough : ' My wife is the Countess of Harlestone now, and no subject for the jest of a mannerless fellow like you.

Make your amends to her through me or I will put your foul words back down your dirty throat.' His only answer was a thick, hoarse laugh and another jest, worst than the first. Before he had finished it my fist flew out and caught him in the jaw, and I felt his teeth grind and rattle under the blow ; then, before he could get his guard up, I sent my left home on his mouth, and he rolled over, coughing and spitting blood through his cut and bleeding lips. I left him there as he fell, and went back to cool my head and my anger in a basin of cold water in my own room. They were two righteous blows that I had given him, and I would have given them all the same in such a cause even if I had known that I was to pay twice the price for them that I had to pay in the years that were to come. The next morning the dream of our boy-and-girl love ended in good earnest, for our guardians, in what they thought their wisdom and we thought their cruelty, had decided that it would not be proper for us to be left together any longer, so that day I was to start for London, and a week later for France, and my countess was to begin the training and education that was to fit her to take the high place in the world of rank and fashion that would be hers when our marriage became a reality.

So at last our farewells were said, and the first real sorrow had fallen upon our two young lives, though how long and how bitter it was to be, and with what terrible realities that innocent little play of ours in Lady Rosamund's Walk was one day to be made true, we were happily spared from knowing. Thus the curtain falls upon the first scene of my life, to rise again upon one far different — one in which war must take the place of love, and soft embraces give place to the death-grips of battle, where the music will not be wedding bells but the roar of artillery and the thunder of charging squadrons and all the din of the fierce struggle which the giants of the world were about to wage for the mastery of Europe.