The Magnificent Century

by Thomas B. Costain

  After nightfall the marshal, now the head of the state, summoned three of his closest adherents to his own room. It was, as might have been expected, a small apartment: a hearth large enough only for a small charcoal blaze, a narrow bed, a chair, a crucifix on the wall. It would have been a bare and ascetic lodging to almost anyone else, but it was not lacking in comfort for a man who had spent most of the nights of his life in tents or under the stars. To this room came, therefore, the devoted trio: John, his nephew; John Earley, his squire; and Ralph Mustard, the castellan of Gloucester.

  The marshal began at once on a discourse. “Advise me,” he said, “for by the faith I owe you I see myself entering into an ocean which has neither bottom nor shore.” His eyes filled with tears. “May God help me! They have turned over to me a helpless government, a king without a piece of gold. And as for me, I am very old.”

  John Earley, who is generally believed to have written later the metrical biography L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, which is the sole source for the story of the marshal’s selection, took it on himself to answer. He pointed out that what his master had undertaken could result only in great honor. Even if all the fickle nobility deserted him and surrendered their castles to Louis, he could still take the young King to Ireland and continue the struggle from there. If, on the other hand, things went well, no man would ever have attained such honor on earth.

  The marshal recovered his good spirits at this, and there was a suggestion of mounting enthusiasm in his eyes. He sprang up and began to pace about the room.

  “By God’s glove!” he exclaimed. “The advice is good and true. If all should abandon us, I would carry the King on my shoulders, one leg here and one in Ireland. I would carry him from island to island and land to land, and I would not fail him ever!”

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  The new head of the state gathered the others about him and it was decided that, inasmuch as the war was a holy one, the royalist forces would wear the white cross of the Crusades. The legate, drawing on the wide powers allowed him by the Pope, supplemented this by putting Wales under an interdict and confirming the ban he had placed on Louis and all his adherents. The meeting was characterized by a growing sense of confidence because the small group of zealous men at Gloucester knew that soon all England would be stirring and that public opinion would be with them. If they could hold out long enough with the weakened resources they had inherited from the dead tyrant, they were certain to win. Time was on their side.

  It was decided to hold a national council at Bristol on November 11 and to leave all questions of policy until then. All loyal men were summoned to appear and they came in great numbers, churchman and noble alike, to take the oath of fealty to the boy King. An unexpected arrival was Hubert de Burgh. The French wanted to transfer their activities to the midlands and had concluded a truce with him, thus making it possible for him to leave Dover. Nothing could have been more fortunate. Hubert de Burgh was still chief justiciar and one of the powers of the state. His advice and counsel were needed.

  Two important steps were taken at Bristol. The first was the confirmation of Magna Charta, with some changes, the most noteworthy being omission of the clause which bound the King to lay no tax on the backs of his subjects without their consent. This had been one of the great victories of Runnymede and it might seem that the Charter lost validity without it. In all probability the omission was due to the attitude of the Vatican. Innocent III had declared the Charter null and void, but his successor, Honorius III, gave his unqualified approval to the new version, from which the conclusion might be drawn that the removal of the constitutional check had brought about a change of heart at Rome. It must be remembered also that the men at Bristol had been adherents of John, not blindly accepting everything he did but not belonging to the party of the barons. Their willingness to accept the Charter at all was evidence of the change which one year of time had wrought. The confirmation might be considered a shrewd move to make it easier for the barons ranged behind Louis to renounce his cause, but the reason went much deeper than that. In the few months of bitterness and civil war which had elapsed since Runnymede the Charter had come to be accepted by all men as necessary and, in most respects, just. They might dispute over certain clauses, but in point of principle they were agreed. Runnymede was already a victory for the ages.

  Other omissions were dictated by the fact that the country was at war. The King’s party was sadly in need of funds and supplies to carry on the struggle, and so arbitrary measures, to which men submit when the fate of the nation is at stake, would have to be taken.

  It must be allowed, therefore, that common sense and discretion dictated the Bristol attitude to Magna Charta. It was a time for conciliation and not for sharp measures. In the light of subsequent events it is easy to see behind the decisions the wise moderation of William the Marshal and the shrewdness of Gualo.

  The second step taken was a decision on the strategy to be followed. It was generally agreed that it would not be wise to risk everything on a pitched battle with the invaders, who still had a great preponderance of strength. It was decided instead to use Fabian tactics while recruiting more adherents and accumulating strength.

  Hubert de Burgh, confirmed in his post of justiciar, went back to Dover to continue his defense of that most important fort. William the Marshal, given the power of a regent with the title Rector noster et Regni nostri, set about consolidating the royalist position in the West and summoning back the recalcitrant barons. This he attempted to do by writing letters to all of them, pointing out that the death of John had changed the situation and that, with a new king committed to observe the Charter, their duty was to swear fealty and to fight under the three leopards.

  While Louis spent the winter months in attacks on castles here and there, dissipating his strength in sieges, the old marshal was skillfully undermining his support and detaching man after man from the French cause.

  1The previous volume in this series. The Conquerors, brought the story of English history up to the point of John’s death.

  The War against the Invaders

  PRINCE LOUIS was a small man, pale of face and austere of expression. He had little in him seemingly of his brilliant and turbulent father, Philip Augustus. A certain saintliness was claimed for him which undoubtedly he inherited from his grandfather, the ineffectual Louis VII, and which would assert itself so magnificently in his son, that great king who is called St. Louis. An anecdote persists that a good friend, one Archambaud de Bourbon, believing that the prince’s health suffered from his rigid continence, hired a beautiful young woman to climb into his bed while he was asleep. On waking and finding himself with a bedfellow, the prince ordered her, courteously but firmly, to leave. He was reported to have added, “I cannot commit a mortal sin.”

  The chaste and reserved prince might be pious, but he was a lion when stirred to fighting pitch. Philip Augustus was easy to rouse to anger and easy to calm down; Louis, hard to rouse, hard to appease. Despite his frail stature he was a champion of mettle, and an old chronicle says, “He put on his cuirass like Judas Maccabaeus.” He does not seem to have had much skill in generalship, however, accepting too completely the conceptions of warfare which chivalry had imposed on the Christian world and which would be shattered in a very few years, first by Sabutai leading the armies of Genghis Khan into the heart of the Holy Roman Empire and cutting armies of steel-clad knights to pieces, and later by a plebeian weapon called the longbow in the hands of English churls. His plan for conquering England was to take one castle after another and to enlarge gradually the arc of his control. The weakness of this method was that each castle taken necessitated leaving a garrison behind, thus leading to a stage when all his troops would be roosting in captured keeps and strutting on alien battlements. This method kept wars going interminably; it led to continuous truces and in the end to a paucity of results. Louis, it seems, moreover, was a poor judge of men. The lieutenants to whom he entrusted the command of his little arm
ies in preference to more experienced English barons were young French knights who were ready to lay their lives down bravely but who had no capacity for leadership.

  In February, Philip Augustus summoned his son home to discuss the situation. It was believed that the French King was anxious to avoid papal confirmation of the ban of excommunication laid by Gualo on all Frenchmen under arms on English soil, but this was not the real reason, Philip Augustus had a hide impervious to such darts, having been banned himself on more than one occasion. He had been blowing hot and cold, however, on the English adventure and was beginning to doubt the issue. It was as clear to the French monarch as it was to William the Marshal that time was not fighting on the side of the French.

  It was easy to summon Louis home, but it was not easy for the prince to obey. The adherence of the Cinque Ports to his cause had become so doubtful that it was not possible to sail from any of them while between London and the harbors westward lay the Weald in which lurked the ever-watchful Willikin. Louis ventured out from London with a considerable escort but with some trepidation, a state of mind which was justified by subsequent events. They took a circuitous course through Kent and then swung in between the Weald and the coast, hoping to reach Winchelsea, where Eustace the Monk could take them off in his ships. As they passed Lewes arrows began to fall on the rear guard and fast-riding horsemen shouting, “The Rood! The Rood!” closed in on them. Willikin had detected the maneuver and he struck at them so ferociously that the French party was thrown into confusion and started a hasty flight for Winchelsea. The guerrilla band followed on their heels and took many prisoners, including two nephews of the Count of Nevers. They cut off all stragglers and kept up such an incessant attack that the Frenchmen reached Winchelsea in a breathless state.

  They found the town empty and gutted of supplies. The inhabitants had left and the men had joined forces with those of the nearby town of Rye. They returned in full force to hem Louis in on the east while Willikin poised a continual threat of assault on the west. Louis was in a serious plight. Finally, however, a rescue party, riding by way of Canterbury to avoid suspicion, came down through Romney and arrived at Winchelsea just in time to save the prince and his men from dying of starvation. Eustace arrived with some ships off the coast at the same time and took the harried prince and his men aboard.

  There was a stormy interview between the French King and Louis when the latter arrived at his father’s court. Philip Augustus was not pleased with the way things were going. He declared himself to have been against the venture in the first place (this, of course, was not true) and he found fault, on much sounder ground, with his son’s handling of the invasion. It was now a lost cause and he had no intention of spending further money on armies and supplies. Louis protested without making any impression on the imperious monarch. He went then to his wife and begged her assistance.

  It is high time to tell something of this remarkable woman known to history as Blanche of Castile. When it had been decided some fifteen years before that a Spanish bride should be sought for Louis, King Alfonso had two candidates to offer, his daughters Blanche and Uracca. The King of France decided that the name Blanche would have a more familiar sound in the ears of his subjects and accordingly she was selected. Seventy-eight-year-old Queen Eleanor, widow of Henry II of England and grandmother of the two Spanish princesses, rode all the way to Castile to make the final arrangements and to escort the bride in proper state to her royal husband. When that wise and indomitable woman reached the Spanish court she must have wondered about the wisdom of the choice. Uracca was a dazzling beauty, so lovely, in fact, that Blanche looked plain beside her. Comparison with this beautiful sister was not fair, however, to the prospective bride. Blanche was comely enough, some reports having it that she bore a slight resemblance to her grandmother; and this was high praise because Eleanor had been the reigning beauty of Europe in her day. The plainer of the two princesses had certain advantages over the more vivacious Uracca which, no doubt, were apparent to the wise eyes of the old Queen. She was serious of disposition and very pious and she possessed, moreover, a gift for management. Eleanor, who had become expert at pulling strings to animate the puppets on the stage of history, must have recognized in this quiet and somewhat repressed granddaughter a kindred spirit.

  Louis was well pleased with his bride. The lovely Uracca might have been too giddy and pleasure-loving for the earnest-minded prince, but Blanche was the perfect wife for him. She was as ambitious as he was, as unremitting in her addiction to duty. They became deeply attached, bringing twelve children into the world, six of whom lived. They were model parents, and their life together seems to have been passed without a ripple of disagreement. Taller than her spouse and of a natural sternness of temperament, Blanche dominated Louis as she afterward did her son, the saintly King.

  When Blanche found that her formidable father-in-law had turned against any continuation of the effort to annex the crown of England, she took matters into her own hands. Storming into his presence, she demanded that he change his mind. French biographers have compared her to Semiramis, the fabled Queen of the Four Quarters of the World who was fed as an infant by doves and later took the form of a bird. There was nothing dove-like in the outraged advocate of action who cornered the monarch and passionately demanded that he continue to support his son. She left his presence finally with threats that, if he remained obdurate, she would raise the money by pawning her children. It is assumed in the records of the day that the King was disturbed by the picture this conjured up in his mind of his beloved grandchildren held as hostages by Lombardy usurers and, if not actually displayed in shops with tickets on them, at least compelled to exist in a mean form of captivity. It is easier to believe that he had intended always to go on supporting the army of invasion but had sensed that opposition might strengthen the backbone of the prince to more determined efforts. It might have been, again, a ruse on his part to deceive the Pope as to his real attitude. It is still more possible, of course, that he could not stand out against his resolute daughter-in-law. Whatever the reason, he gave in finally and promised Blanche the financial support she was demanding.

  Blanche seems to have been fated to play the role of the activating force behind her less aggressive and far from practical men. It was devolving on her now to put drive and initiative behind her brave but decidedly not inspired husband. In later years she would rule France during the minority of Louis IX and through the long years he spent at the Crusades, drawing on the resources of the kingdom to supply him with men and money and supplies, thus making it possible for him to achieve historical greatness.

  In the present instance she went to work with a grim resolve to win for her husband the throne of England. She went out and raised more money wherever she could, pawning her personal possessions if not her children. With the funds thus made available she established her headquarters at Calais and proceeded to buy equipment for the mercenary troops she was recruiting and to secure ships for the transport of the army. She harried Eustace the Monk and played so violently on the patriotism of the knights of France that three hundred of them enlisted for service in England.

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  While Louis was in France the marshal was at work. He went on a tour of the southeast corner of the kingdom, winning adherents everywhere. The men of the Cinque Ports, who had been wavering, were ready now to come over in a body. His own son, William, was among the most notable of the converts, and the Earl of Salisbury, a natural son of Henry II by the Fair Rosamonde and more familiarly known as William Long-Espée. Other barons joined the train of the newly appointed head of the state and were with him at a council of war held with Willikin of the Weald. A vigorous plan of action was marked out, and the boy King’s supporters began then to hammer so effectively at the outer edges of the French holdings that castle after castle fell to them, Winchester, Farnham, Marlborough, Knap. Willikin swooped down on Dover and burned the camp of the besiegers, hanging Frenchmen as fast as he could get his han
ds on them. The result of all this furious activity was that Louis, returning around the end of April, had to make a landing at night and dash in great haste for the security of London.

  The campaign which followed reflected the weakness of purpose of Louis and his halfhearted English allies. The prince was persuaded to send the largest part of his troops on a thrust into the midlands, where the castle of Mountsorel was being invested by royalists. Resuming command himself of the operations around Dover, Louis placed the Count of Perche in charge of the northern excursion. The count was one of the bravest and rashest of his many brave and rash young men and probably the least suited for such a mission. Finding that the siege of Mountsorel had been raised, Perche felt he must achieve something to justify this elaborate foray and shoved on up the Belvoir road to attack the city of Lincoln. The widow of the castellan of Lincoln, a brave woman named Nicolette de Camville, retired into the castle and defended it so bravely that all the efforts of the French forces were in vain.