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The excommunicated and schismatic emperor, Louis of Bavaria, welcomed the advances of Burghersh. More than one tie already bound the Bavarian to England.
The castle belonged to Badlesmere, whose wife was then residing there, with his kinsman, Bartholomew Burghersh, and a competent garrison. Lady Badlesmere refused to admit the queen, declaring that, without her lord's orders, she could not venture to entertain any one. Bitterly indignant at the insult, the queen took up her quarters in the neighbouring priory and attempted to force an entrance.
The narrow-mindedness and obstinacy inherent in her family for no Burghersh was ever known to see more than one side of any thing was softened and modified in him into firmness and fidelity. His heart was large enough to hold a deep reservoir of love, but not so wide at its exit as to allow the stream to flow forth in all directions at once. If this be narrow-mindedness, then he was narrow-minded.
He employed the interval in making peace more impossible than ever. On October 7, he renewed his claim to the French crown, repudiated the homage into which he had been tricked during his infancy, and sent Bishop Burghersh straight from Valenciennes to Paris as bearer of his defiance. Thus the autumn of 1337 saw a virtual declaration of war. In November the first serious hostilities took place.
First, Edward his eldest son, prince of Wales, who as then was of the age of thirteen years or thereabout, the earls of Hereford, Northampton, Arundel, Cornwall, Warwick, Huntingdon, Suffolk, and Oxford; and of barons the lord Mortimer, who was after earl of March, the lords John, Louis and Roger of Beauchamp, and the lord Raynold Cobham; of lords the lord of Mowbray, Ros, Lucy, Felton, Bradestan, Multon, Delaware, Manne, Basset, Berkeley, and Willoughby, with divers other lords; and of bachelors there was John Chandos, Fitz-Warin, Peter and James Audley, Roger of Wetenhale, Bartholomew of Burghersh, and Richard of Pembridge, with divers other that I cannot name.
Count William I. of Hainault, Holland, and Zealand was Edward III.'s father-in-law, and, during the last months of his strenuous career, he welcomed Bishop Burghersh, Edward's chief diplomatist, to his favourite residence of Valenciennes, where from April, 1337, the English ambassadors kept great state, "sparing as little as if the king were present there in his own person," and striving with all their might to build up an alliance with the princes of the Low Countries.
Then the captal de Buch, sir Aymenion of Pommiers, the lord Bartholomew of Burghersh and the lord Eustace d'Aubrecicourt, all these the prince sent forth to see if they might know what the Frenchmen did. These knights departed with two hundred men of arms well horsed; they rode so far that they saw the great battle of the king's, they saw all the fields covered with men of arms.
The head came away and sweated wonder-working oils, and was casketted and placed at the end of the present Burghersh tombs, as a shrine of which the broken pedestal and the knee-worn pavement are still to be seen. The body was placed in a shrine cased with plates of gold and silver, crusted with gems, and at the last protected by a grille of curious wrought iron.
After two or three hours he called Lord Burghersh, "Frank, Frank!" and was found to be almost in a state of collapse, and died that evening. Mr. H 's story might very well have been a camp rumor. It seems to me that the British Ministry, in its notion of a life-peerage, shows an entire misunderstanding of what makes people desire the peerage.
At the same moment Chandos, with Audley, Nigel, Bartholomew Burghersh, the Captal de Buch, and a score of other knights sprang upon their horses, and charging down the narrow lane rode over the French line in front of them. Once through it they spurred to left and right, trampling down the dismounted men-at-arms.
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