Free The White Cross by Richard Masefield Page B

greatest Christian power in a millennium; an empire it takes months to ride across from one end to the other.
    In the eight weeks since Henry’s burial at Fontevraud, a new die for the Great Seal of England has been struck, to show the King on one side riding out to battle and on the other solemnly enthroned, with action and judgement thus confirmed as aspects of his majesty.
    Although he’ll need to be a paragon of both, his mother tells herself, if Dickard is to take Jerusalem and still hold fast to all our western acquisitions.
    Above the central crossing of the Abbey, its famous tower rises a hundred feet into the sky. Domed and gilded, the great glass lantern spangles the chancel pavement with a thousand jewels of coloured light. A sacred grove, a sunlit clearing in a forest of stone columns, it is the place where every king since the first William has been crowned; where presently the latest of the line lies face-down before the shrine of the Confessor to crave forgiveness for his many well-attested sins.
    Archbishop Baldwin, waiting to grant Richard absolution, has set himself for once to outshine the royal sinner. In place of his stark habit he’s assumed a jewelled mitre and a cope of flame and tawny silk, to make up what he lacks in height and clash deliberately with the royal purple; a garment that’s so heavily embroidered with gold wire it might have stood up without a man inside.
    As Primate of all England, Baldwin’s required to be more opulent, essentially more powerful than its king. Yet as a Devon man it’s near impossible to play the gilded emperor without feeling absurd. Remembering a pedlar’s monkey he’d once seen dressed in crimson satin, he cannot help but smile at his approaching monarch, and pray to God to stop him laughing outright.
    ‘In the name of God I undertake to all Christians subject to my rule, these three things: First that I will strive to help the Holy Church of God, her ministers and people to preserve true peace.’
    Richard’s polished golden head is raised to take the triple coronation oath as he stands face to face with Baldwin. His voice, the kind that only an outsized pair of lungs can possibly deliver, is sonorous and passionately sincere. ‘Secondly,’ he booms, ‘I swear that I’ll forbid rapacity and all iniquities to all degrees. Third, that in all judgements I will grant justice and true mercy in emulation of Almighty God the Merciful and Clement.’
    While the congregation add Amens, Duke Richard applies his leonine moustache to the jewelled cover of Saint Edward’s bible and is led by his archbishop – looking this time, Baldwin rather fears, like some little fair-day fiddler leading an enormous bear – led north, south, east and west to each side of the Abbey crossing, to ask those in the chancel, in both transepts and the body of the church if they are willing to accept him as their Sovereign.
    ‘We will and grant it so!’ Four times the thunderous response. Then Richard kneels before the altar to demonstrate his own mortality, is stripped by his attendant bishops of every article of outer clothing, to stand at last before the congregation barefoot, bare-legged, in nothing but his shirt and drawers. Born to the purple, heir to the greatest monarch and richest doweress of the western world, the new king strides in his underclothing to anointing.
    ‘Let us anoint these hands with holy oil, as kings of old and prophets have been hallowed.’ Tentatively Baldwin dips his thumb into the ancient, evil smelling essence to daub an oily cross athwart the smooth white palms of one who’s never ridden but in gauntlets. He fumbles with the clasp at Richard’s shoulder to free the shirt and pull it down around his waist for the anointing of his upper body.
    ‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…’ He traces lines like glistening snail creeps across the massive pectorals and barrel chest – the heavy pulse, the humid texture of perspiring skin, the