supplicating the Queen of Virgins that she would vouchsafe grace to the King of England and his successors, that they might have power and will to be obedient to the Church as her children, and that our Lord Jesus Christ would cause them more fully to love the said Church, suddenly appeared to me the Blessed Virgin Mary, having on her breast a drop of water, glittering like fine gold, and holding in her hand a little vial (ampoule) of stone. And after she had taken from her breast the drop of water and put it in the vial, she spoke to me these words: 'This is the unction with which the kings of England shall be anointed; not those who reign now, but those who are to reign; for those who reign now are wicked, and so will be their successors, and, for their iniquity shall lose many things. However, kings of England shall come, and shall be anointed with this unction, and shall be benign and obedient to the Church, and shall not possess their lands or lordships until they are so anointed. The first of these shall recover, without violence, the countries of Normandy and Aquitaine, which their predecessors had lost. This king shall be great amongst kings, and it will be he who shall re-edify many churches in the Holy Land, and drive all the pagans from Babylon, where he shall erect rich monasteries, and put all the enemies of religion to flight. And when he wears about his neck this drop of golden water, he shall be victorious and augment his kingdom. As for thee, thou shall die a martyr for sustaining the rights of the Church.' I then prayed the holy and sacred Lady to tell me in what sanctuary I should place this sacred deposit; and she replied, that there was in this city a monk of the monastery of St. Cyprian of Poitiers, named Babilonius, who had been unjustly driven forth by his abbot, where he desired to be reinstated by apostolic authority; to him I was ordered to give this vial, in order that he might carry it to the city of Poitiers, and place it in the church of St. Gregory, which is near the church of St. Hilaire, and put it at the extremity of the said church, towards the east, under a great stone, where it would be found when the proper hour arrived to anoint the kings of England, and that the chief of the Pagans should be the cause of the discovery of the said golden drop. Accordingly I enclosed this treasure in a leaden vessel, and gave it to the said monk, Babilonius, to bear to the church of St. Gregory, as it was commanded."
What object Saint Thomas of Canterbury had in thus mystifying the monks of Poitiers, or to what prince or pagan he pointed at, remains a secret: whether the holy vial ever was found cannot now be known; or, if any discovery of such was made in that period of discoveries, the great Revolution, it was probably consigned to destruction with numerous other equally authentic relics. The most remarkable sentence in this pancarte is, perhaps, the prophecy of his own death by the martyr, always admitting that the whole was not composed and arranged after the event had happened.
Bouchet, glad of the opportunity of dwelling on wonders, finishes his tale by relating the circumstances of Becket's murder, and how at his burial a choir of angels led the anthem, which the monks followed: also how the cruel homicides by the judgment of God were suddenly punished; for some of them ate their own fingers, others became mad and demoniacs, and others lost the use of all their limbs.
The relics in the churches of Poitiers were of the most extraordinary value; each vied with the other in wonders of the kind, until all the bones of all the saints in the calendar seemed gathered together in this favoured city. Whenever a prince had offended the Church, he made his peace by presenting some precious offering which was beyond price; as, for instance, in 1109, the Duke of Aquitaine, father of Elionore, after having been pardoned for one of his numerous offences, caused to be enclosed in a magnificent shrine of gold, two bones and part of the beard of the blessed Saint Peter, prince of apostles, which St. Hilaire himself had brought to his church. Soon after, to prove his repentance of some new peccadillo, Guillaume gave certain dismes to the monks and priests of St. Hilaire, with the use of the forest of Moulière.
St. Bernard himself was obliged on one occasion to come to Poitiers to admonish the refractory duke, who chose to have an opinion of his own in acknowledging the pope, and many miracles were performed during his stay. Once St. Bernard severely reprimanded the duke at the altar, in the cathedral, who was for the moment terrified at his denunciations; but no sooner had he left the church than he ordered the altar at which the saint had stood to be demolished; and a priest to proclaim and command the adherence of all persons to whatever pope their duke had adopted; but this impiety was signally visited, for the priest fell down dead at the altar as he was uttering the words. Also the dean, under whose auspices St. Bernard's altar had been destroyed, fell sick immediately, and died mad and in despair, for he cut his throat in his bed: besides which, one of the refractory bishops—he of Limoges—fell from his mule to the ground, and striking his head against a stone, was killed on the spot; and for these reasons and evident signs, Duke William acknowledged his error, and replaced the Bishop of Poitiers, whom he had deposed, in his chair.
This is the William, known by his romantic adventures as "The Armed Hermit," who, no doubt, disgusted with the tyranny of the Church, whose members at that time never ceased to interfere with the monarchs of Europe, resolved to abandon his kingdom, and embrace a life of quiet, as he supposed, "in some horrible desert." He was encouraged in the idea by interested persons, and feigning to die, left a will, by which his young daughter, Elionore, became the heiress of Aquitaine; he then secretly quitted the court, directing his steps to the shrine of St. James, in Galicia, where he joined a holy hermit, and put himself under his tuition. By diabolic temptation it seems, however, that he could never be content in any of the deserts; where, still clothed in armour, cap-à-pié, he endeavoured in vain to forget his belligerent propensities, for, every now and then, when he heard of a siege toward, he would suddenly sally forth, and having assisted in the skirmish, again seized with a fit of repentant devotion, would hurry back to some desolate retreat, and endeavour, by penitence and fasts, to obliterate the sin he had committed.
His death was attended by so many miracles that it became necessary to canonize him; and orders of hermit monks rose up in every quarter, bearing his name of Guillemins, the chief of which were the Blanc Manteaux of Paris. The example of sanctity he had set in the latter part of his life seemed to have been lost on the turbulent and coquettish Queen of the Court of Love, his daughter, Elionore, and to have been also sufficiently disregarded by his grandsons. Not that Elionore neglected to build and endow churches and monasteries in every part of her dominions, particularly at Poitiers; and, probably, she considered all offences wiped out by so doing: not excepting her criminal project, recorded by Bouchet, of quitting her husband, Louis of France, and "espousing the Sultan Saladin, with whose image and portraiture she had fallen in love."
Whatever motives Louis le Jeune had in getting rid of his powerful wife, policy could not be one; for never was a more foolish business; he did not, perhaps, contemplate, in his shortsightedness, that she would marry his rival, and carry all her possessions to the crown of England; but he was sure that by dissolving his marriage he was injuring France. The account of the state of the great heiress, insulted and injured in so vital a point, is piteous enough, and not unlike, in position, to the case of Queen Catherine when repudiated by Henry VIII.
"This dissolution and separation was signified to Queen Elionore by the bishops, who undertook the task with great regret, for they knew it would be very displeasing to the poor lady, who, as soon as the decision was announced to her, fell in a swoon from the chair on which she sat, and was for more than two hours without speaking, or weeping, or unclosing her clenched teeth. And when she was a little come to herself, she began, with her clear and blue (vers) eyes, to look around on those who brought her the news, and said, 'Ha! my lords, what have I done to the king that he should quit me? in what have I offended him? what defect finds he in my person? I am not barren, I am not illegitimate, nor come of a low race. I am wealthy as he is by my means. I have always obeyed him; and if we speak of lineage, I spring from the Emperor Otho the First and King Lothaire; descended in direct line from Charlemagne; besides which we are relations both by father and mother if he requires to be informed of it.'"
"Madam," said the Archbishop of Limoges, "you speak truth indeed. You are relations; but of that the king was ignorant, and it is for that very cause that he finds you
