Here is a story that has lain dormant for seven hundred years. At first it wassuppressed by one of the Plantagenet kings of England. Later it was forgotten.I happened to dig it up by accident. The accident being the relationship of mywife’s cousin to a certain Father Superior in a very ancient monastery inEurope.
He let me pry about among a quantity of mildewed and musty manuscripts and Icame across this. It is very interesting—partially since it is a bit ofhitherto unrecorded history, but principally from the fact that it records thestory of a most remarkable revenge and the adventurous life of its innocentvictim—Richard, the lost prince of England.
In the retelling of it, I have left out most of the history. What interested mewas the unique character about whom the tale revolves—the visoredhorseman who—but let us wait until we get to him.
It all happened in the thirteenth century, and while it was happening, it shookEngland from north to south and from east to west; and reached across thechannel and shook France. It started, directly, in the London palace of HenryIII, and was the result of a quarrel between the King and his powerfulbrother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.
Never mind the quarrel, that’s history, and you can read all about it atyour leisure. But on this June day in the year of our Lord 1243, Henry soforgot himself as to very unjustly accuse De Montfort of treason in thepresence of a number of the King’s gentlemen.
De Montfort paled. He was a tall, handsome man, and when he drew himself to hisfull height and turned those gray eyes on the victim of his wrath, as he didthat day, he was very imposing. A power in England, second only to the Kinghimself, and with the heart of a lion in him, he answered the King as no otherman in all England would have dared answer him.
“My Lord King,” he cried, “that you be my Lord King aloneprevents Simon de Montfort from demanding satisfaction for such a gross insult.That you take advantage of your kingship to say what you would never dare saywere you not king, brands me not a traitor, though it does brand you acoward.”
Tense silence fell upon the little company of lords and courtier