Finally we get the information as to who were the child's sponsors and of the high ecclesiastic who was one of them, and doubtless came across specially from Newenham Abbey to perform the ceremony, making his distinguished godson a commensurate present. Thomas Bowyer and Ralph Northampton remember
"that they were personally present in the said church, and saw there three long torches burning, and two silver basins, with two silver ewers full of water, John Legge then Abbot of Newenham and Sir William Bonevile being the godfathers and Agnes Bygode the godmother of the same child, upon whom the said Abbot there bestowed a silver gilt cup of the value, as it was said, of 100 shillings, with 40 shillings in money told, contained in the same, which as it appeared to them was the most beautiful they had ever beheld in a like case."
Poor child! The lambs bleating outside, and the glittering gift cup,--"the most beautiful they had ever beheld,"--and filled with silver pieces! The costly christening vessels and flaming torches, the abbot in his robes, the knights and ladies in their splendid apparel, the clustering parishioners gathered round, curiously and respectfully to witness the baptism of the heir, and the solemn evening twilight softly stealing through the casements of the little sanctuary. What a suggestive picture of country wealth and peace thus surrounding the first hours of the child, and what a contrast to the scene that was destined to environ that child's last hours, of whose bitterness, what seer, had he been then present, would have been bold enough to predicate? When crushed by misfortune, his son and grandson having fallen by the sword before his eyes a few weeks previously, and although bowed by age, yet still attracted by the glamour of the deadly conflict,--far away from these happy precincts, with a captive king in his keeping as a ransom, but powerless to save him,--he stood an unfriended prisoner alone in the hands of a relentless enemy, surrounded by the ghastly wrecks of a battlefield, and then hastily perished amid the ghastlier paraphernalia of the scaffold, the axe and block, the executioner in his mask and the jeering soldiery. With what boundless mercy are the ultimate issues of these lives of ours hidden from us!