Here is a story that has lain dormant for seven hundred years. At first it
was suppressed by one of the Plantagenet kings of England. Later it was
forgotten. I happened to dig it up by accident. The accident being the
relationship of my wife's cousin to a certain Father Superior in a very
ancient monastery in Europe.
He let me pry about among a quantity of mildewed and musty manuscripts and I came across this. It is very interesting -- partially since it is a bit
of hitherto unrecorded history, but principally from the fact that it
records the story of a most remarkable revenge and the adventurous life of
its innocent victim -- Richard, the lost prince of England.
In the retelling of it, I have left out most of the history. What
interested me was the unique character about whom the tale revolves -- the
visored horseman who -- but let us wait until we get to him.
It all happened in the thirteenth century, and while it was happening, it
shook England from north to south and from east to west; and reached across
the channel and shook France. It started, directly, in the London palace
of Henry III, and was the result of a quarrel between the King and his
powerful brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.