United States or Venezuela ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When the message had been given, Captain Morgan formed his soldiers into companies, and bade the monks and nuns whom he had taken, to place the ladders against the walls of the chief castle. He thought that the Spanish Governor would hardly shoot down these religious persons, even though they bore the ladders for the scaling parties. In this he was very much mistaken.
Thirteen unfortunate monks and priests, who had been unable to effect their escape, were arrested and thrown into prison, from whence they were taken a few days later, by order of the ferocious Admiral, and executed under circumstances of great barbarity. The news of this important exploit spread with great rapidity.
"Hurry! hurry! barricade the door! arm yourselves!" was the cry from other voices. "Shall we fight, father? shall we defend ourselves?" cried others, as the monks pressed around their Superior.
I was near asking the monks the same question which the Protestant inhabitants of a Hungarian village one day put to their Catholic neighbours, as they were marching in procession through their streets, "Is your god blind, that you burn candles to him at mid-day?" The tapers lighted, one of the friars dropped on his knees, and fell to praying with great vigour.
Whether King Mark knew this to be so or not, yet of all his court, there were no two who had more reason to hate Sir Launcelot than Sir Bertram and Sir Pendore. For Sir Launcelot had come upon them once when they were in the midst of tormenting two holy men having first taken from them a paltry purse which these two monks were carrying for worthy purpose.
It was all gables, and chimney-stacks, and odd angles, and ivy-mantled wall, and richly-mullioned windows, or quaint little diamond-paned lattices, peeping like a watchful eye from under the shadow of a jutting cornice. The stables had been added in Queen Elizabeth's time, after the monks had been routed from their snug quarters, and the Abbey had been bestowed upon one of the Tudor favourites.
He, too, had heard the tale, heard it with a pale face while his monks crossed themselves. At length he asked of the woman Megges. They replied that living or dead she was, as they supposed, still in the chapel, which none of them had dared to enter. "Come, let us see," said the Abbot, and they went there to find the door locked as Bridget had said.
"It's terribly on my conscience," went on the other, with distress visibly growing as he spoke. "I feel I ought to have seen which way he was going. He was one of my novices, you know, before we were transferred. . . . He would have been here to-day if all had been well. He was to have been one of my monks. I suggested his name."
But on this Gerard fell a thinking how he could spare her purse. "One will do, mother. I will ask the good monks to let me send my copy of their 'Terence: it is on snowy vellum, and I can write no better: so then I shall only need six sheets of vellum for my borders and miniatures, and gold for my ground, and prime colours one crown will do.
Both monks and nuns, when they conformed to the rules of their order, were sad, solitary, dreary-looking people, although their faces shone occasionally in the light of ecstatic visions of heaven and the angels. But whatever mistakes monasticism made, however repulsive the religious life of the Middle Ages, in fact, all its social life, still it must be admitted that the aim of the time was high.
Word Of The Day