the king was then residing, until at length he became well
acquainted with all the localities. Then, watching his opportunity, he
climbed by night through a window into a bedchamber where he thought
the king was lying. He crept up to the bedside, and, throwing back the
clothes, he stabbed several times into the bed with a dagger. He,
however, stabbed nothing but the bed itself, and the pillow, for the
king that night, as it happened, lay in another chamber.

As the student was making his escape, he was spied by one of the
chambermaids named Margaret Biset. Margaret immediately made a great
outcry, and the other servants, coming up, seized the student and
carried him off to prison. He was afterward tried, and was convicted
of treason in having made an attempt upon the king's life, and was
hanged. Before his death he said that he had been employed to kill the
king by another man, a certain William de Marish, who was a noted and
prominent man of those days. This William de Marish was afterward
taken and brought to trial, but he solemnly denied that he had ever
instigated the student to commit the crime. He was, however, condemned
and executed, and, according to the custom in those days in the case
of persons convicted of treason, his body was subjected after his
death to extreme indignities, and then was divided into four quarters,
one of which was sent to each of the four principal cities of the
kingdom, and publicly exhibited in them as a warning to all men of the
dreadful consequences of attempting such a crime.

Great pains were taken in those days to instill into the minds of all
men the idea that to kill a king was the worst crime that a human
being could commit. One of the writers of the time said that in
wounding and killing a prince a man was guilty of homicide, parricide,
Christicide, and even of deicide, all in one; that is, that in the
person of a king slain by the hand of the murderer the criminal
strikes not only at a man, but at his own father, and at Christ his
Savior, and God.

A great many strange and superstitious notions were entertained by the
people in respect to kings. These superstitions were encouraged, even
by the scholars and historians of those times, who might be supposed
to know better. But it was so much for their interest to write what
should be agreeable to the king and to his court, that they were by no
means scrupulous in respect to the tales which they told, provided
they were likely