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Victurnien had thinned his last thin, white hairs. "Our Martyr-King did not die like the English King Charles." That thought soothed Mlle. Armande's splendid indignation; a shudder ran through her; but still she did not realize what Chesnel meant. "To-morrow we will decide what we must do," she said; "it needs thought. At the worst, we have our lands." "Yes," said Chesnel.
Other relics of the martyr-king used to be at Little Compton viz. some beams of the Whitehall scaffold, whose exact position has occasioned so much controversy. The velvet armchair and footstool used by the King during his memorable trial were also preserved here, but of late years have found a home at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, some six miles away.
You may no longer see the coffins of the predecessors of Louis XVI. But those of the Martyr-King, of the Queen Marie Antoinette, of the Duke of Berry, of Louis XVIII., are there before you in the crypt. Pause. Here is the royal vault of the Bourbons. Your glance can enter only a narrow grated window, through which a little twilight filters.
Ever since the restoration of Charles II., many Englishmen have professed great reverence for the memory of the "martyr-king." Even the subsequent Revolution of 1658 left the monument erected to him untouched. Many British families continued steady in their devotion to the Scotch line, and the name of Jacobite was for them a title of honor.
In face this descendant of royalty was an unmistakable Stuart, with the characteristic aquiline nose, and a proud dignity of expression. He might have sat for the portrait of Charles the Martyr-King, by Vandyck, in Windsor.
Juxon's claims to the Primacy were pre-eminent; he had appeared with the Martyr-King in that memorable scene on the scaffold at Whitehall, and none other than he could fill the Archiepiscopal chair, which had been vacant since Laud had preceded his master in his death upon Tower Hill.
A vast pavilion surmounted by a cross hung with draperies in violet velvet, and enclosing an altar, which was reached on four sides by four stairways of ten steps each, occupied the very place where, the 10th of January, 1793, the scaffold of the Martyr-King had been erected, in the middle of the Place called successively the Place Louis XV. and the Place de La Concorde, and which was thenceforth to be called the Place Louis XVI.
The "Martyr-King" entered this inn as a sovereign; he left it a prisoner under the guard of his Lothian escort. Here he slept his last night of liberty, and as he passed under the archway of the "Saracen's Head" he started on that fatal journey that terminated on the scaffold at Whitehall.
Victurnien had thinned his last thin, white hairs. "Our Martyr-King did not die like the English King Charles." That thought soothed Mlle. Armande's splendid indignation; a shudder ran through her; but still she did not realize what Chesnel meant. "To-morrow we will decide what we must do," she said; "it needs thought. At the worst, we have our lands." "Yes," said Chesnel.
"Here, o'er the martyr-king the marble weeps, And fast beside him once-fear'd Edward sleeps; The grave unites, where e'en the grave finds rest, And mingled here the oppressor and the opprest." In the royal vault in the choir repose Henry the Eighth and his third queen Jane Seymour, together with the martyred Charles the First.
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