aster Aristoteles did not concern
himself.

Next came Father Nicholas. A light sentence also sufficed for him, not
on account of his innocence, but because his friend the Abbot of Ham was
a friend of the Bishop of Winchester.

Earl Hubert of Kent was then tried. The animus of his accusers was
plainly shown, for they brought up again all the old hackneyed charges
on account of which he had been pardoned years before--for some of them
more than once. The affront offered to the King by the Earl's marriage
with Margaret of Scotland, the fact that she and his third wife were
within the forbidden degrees, and that no dispensation had been
obtained; these were renewed, with all the other disproved and spiteful
accusations of old time. But the head and front of the offending, in
this instance, was of course the marriage of his daughter. It did not
make much difference that Hubert calmly swore that he had never known of
the marriage, either before or after, except what he had learned from
the simple statement of the Countess his wife, to the effect that it had
been contracted at Bury Saint Edmund's, during his absence at Merton.
The fervent intercession of Hubert's friends, moved by the passionate
entreaties of the Countess, did not make much difference either; but
what did make a good deal was that the Earl (who knew his royal master)
offered a heavy golden bribe for pardon of the crime he had not
committed. King Henry thereupon condescended to announce that in
consideration of the effect produced upon his compassionate heart by the
piteous intercession of the prisoner's friends,--

"His fury should abate, and he
The crowns would take."

Earl Hubert therefore received a most gracious pardon, and was permitted
to return (minus the money) to the bosom of his distracted family.

But the heaviest vengeance fell on the young head of Richard de Clare,
and through him on the fair girl with the cedar hair, whose worst crime
was that she had loved him. It was not vengeance that could be weighed
like Hubert's coins, or told on the clock like the imprisonment of his
physician. It was counted out, throb by throb, in the agony of two
human hearts, one fiercely stabbed and artificially healed, and the
other left to bleed to death like a wounded doe.

The King's first step was to procure a solemn Papal sentence of divorce
between Richard and Margaret. Their consent, of course, was neither
asked nor thought needful. His Ma