A Pride of Kings (The Plantagenets Book 1)

by Juliet Dymoke

  He looked down at his daughter. ‘By all the Saints, she is indeed a Marshal, this little one.’ He touched the soft crinkled cheek with one finger and then followed Eleanor from the room, filled with a sensation of completeness, of such happiness that he thought himself the most fortunate of men.

  An hour later at supper that contentment was shattered by the arrival of an exhausted messenger to say that Prince John was in rebellion, that he had declared himself his brother’s heir in the place of Arthur and that he had seized Windsor Castle. Eleanor’s dark eyes flashed into life.

  ‘By the Blood of Christ, is he mad? Has he proof that his brother is dead? No, I say! We will march at once, tomorrow morning, and lay siege to Windsor to bring him to his senses. My lord of Pembroke, will you order it?’

  ‘Willingly, your grace,’ he said at once. ‘I promise you I will bring the Prince to terms and send you news as soon as –’

  ‘Send?’ she retorted. ‘I am riding with you, William. Old I may be, but not too old to sit in the saddle. It is only two years since I journeyed to Italy with Richard’s bride. I am not senile yet and it is I who will bring John to heel. He will learn that Richard’s throne is not yet empty!’

  She was utterly determined and together she and William with some six hundred knights set out for Basingstoke, sleeping the night there before pressing on to Windsor. John held out for a while but the sight of his mother riding daily below the walls directing the siege operations unnerved him to such an extent that one night he slipped out of a postern gate. He retreated to Nottingham, the garrison capitulated and it was while the Queen and her followers were still there that William, standing one morning outside the chapel after Mass, looked towards the gateway to see a familiar figure ride in.

  ‘Nephew!’ he exclaimed and strode forward. ‘What in the name of St Peter are you doing here?’

  John dismounted. His skin was still burned brown from the desert sun, and he seemed to William to have grown broader and stronger. ‘I bring good news,’ he said at once, ‘at least in part. King Richard is found. He is alive and in one of Duke Leopold’s castles!’

  ‘Thank God!’ William seized his arm. ‘How was he found? And is he free?’

  John smiled, brushing the newly cultivated moustache on his upper lip, subconsciously copying his famous uncle in all things. ‘It was the strangest affair. Do you recall that minstrel he had, Blondel, the fair fellow he used to sing with in the evenings? It was Blondel who found him by singing his way across Europe until he heard someone answer the song only he and Richard knew because they wrote it together. What a fellow! But,’ his smile faded, ‘the King is not free – though the news has caused such a stir that Duke Leopold is put out of countenance. Every ruler has protested that he should hold so great a warrior, especially after all that Richard has done in the Holy Land. He is forced to house the King better at least.’

  ‘We must go to the Queen and tell her. But why has Leopold not freed the King? Surely now –’

  ‘He wants a ransom,’ John said. ‘A hundred thousand marks.’

  ‘Good God!’ William exclaimed. ‘How vile a man he must be – to hold a King of England who bears the Cross and trade for him as if he were in a market. Well, we will raise it somehow. Come, I’ll take you to Queen Eleanor and you shall tell her it all.’

  In Nottingham Castle John had also heard the news. A month later, despite the fact that his secret ally, King Philip, had offered to pay Leopold double the sum to keep his prisoner close, Eleanor and Richard’s staunch supporters had begged, borrowed, raised taxes and somehow found the money. On hearing this Philip sent a brief note to John.

  ‘Have a care for yourself. The devil is loose.’

  Richard came home to a hero’s welcome. William, however, had been summoned to the bedside of his dying brother and was not there to see it, but after he and his nephew had laid John Marshal to rest at Reading, they rode for London. William felt little grief. He and his brother had never been close and the younger John had always been more attached to his uncle than his father, and when they reached the capital they entered into the general rejoicing.

  The bells rang, wine flowed in the streets, the people cheered themselves hoarse, and to his treacherous brother the King said no more than, ‘You are a child and you behave as one but I forgive you. Do you still have your liking for salmon? I will have one prepared for you in a new manner I have learned that will delight you.’ He laughed in a half indulgent, half contemptuous manner, setting an arm about John’s shoulders, and William wondered that he could be so brilliant in the field and so blind in his judgement of men.

  ‘Well?’ Richard asked. ‘What do you think of my “Saucy Castle”, William? That will keep Philip from breaking my borders, will it not?’

  They were standing high above the pleasant valley of Les Andelys where the river Seine turned sharply on a stony shore and a great rock jutted out some three hundred feet high, a vantage point Richard had been quick to seize on. The castle itself, walled and turretted, had been his own brain-child and day by day he had directed its building. William, seeing it for the first time, gazed about him in admiration.

  ‘I can see it will prove a thorn in King Philip’s side,’ he said. The place was seething with men-at-arms, with the vast retinue of knights who accompanied the King everywhere, with serving men and cooks and butlers, fletchers and farriers and smiths, a small city in itself. ‘I would like to know what King Philip thinks of it.’

  Richard gave him a boyish grin. ‘He boasted he would reduce it if the walls were made of iron – and I sent him a message that I would hold my Château Gaillard if it were made of butter.’

  William laughed at this. But accustomed though he was to the interminable squabbles with France, he recognized that the bitterness that now lay between Richard and his onetime friend and ally was deep and lasting. They fought constantly along the border, seizing each other’s castles, taking prisoners and ransoming knights, slaying lesser men with a brutality that seemed to William beyond the natural consequences of war. Even now in one of the towers Richard held the Bishop of Beauvais, a cousin of Philip’s, and William was uneasy that he was still there in chains despite a temporary patched-up truce. He asked now if Richard intended to keep him mewed up. ‘I fear it will cause trouble with the Holy Father,’ he added.

  Richard laughed again, but this time harshly. ‘The bishop is fond of quoting scripture at me, but I say that they that take up the sword shall perish by it. I received the Pope’s plea yesterday – for his son, as he called the bishop – and do you know my answer? I have sent his Holiness the bishop’s mail coat, all bloodied from fighting against us. If he considers his bishops should put on armour to slay their Christian brothers then he is not fit to sit in St Peter’s chair. No, the bishop will be ransomed as any other man taken in the field.’

  ‘You are right,’ William said, and then called out to his six-year-old son. ‘William, do not climb up there.’ The boy scampered down from the ramparts and came to his father’s side. He was a large child, very like him, promising to have the same height and strength, and his father had recently betrothed him to the daughter of Baldwin of Bethune, a wealthy Norman lord.

  ‘Sire.’ He looked up at the King in awe. ‘I have never seen such a castle. It will stand for ever, won’t it?’

  ‘I built it in that hope, Richard said, smiling. ‘Go and see my friend Peter there; he is one of my stonemasons. Ask him to show you the highest turret, see, where my standard flies? He will make sure you don’t tumble down.’

  The young William ran off in high excitement and the King turned to his companion. ‘You are fortunate to have so fine a son. And Richard, too – I trust you have named him as much for me as for Strongbow – does he keep well? You did say –’

  ‘He is not strong, sire, but I think now he will reach manhood, he grows better with the years. Our third son, Gilbert, is a sturdy fellow and my lord of Clare stands godfather to his namesake.’

 
Richard turned to look out over the green countryside stretching away below them, and he gave a sudden deep sigh.

  ‘I envy you, William. I have no heir of my body.’

  William remained silent, watching him. Richard had wanted to marry Berengaria, perhaps in his own way he loved her, but he cared for other things more and neglected his Queen. She had never been to England and lived mainly in Anjou, seeing little of her energetic husband, who was constantly on the move, seldom at her side. William pitied her for on the rare occasions when he saw her she looked small and frail and sad. They were to join her in Aquitaine this Christmas and he guessed how she must be longing for the festive days to come. ‘There is time yet,’ he said, and Richard gave a shrug.

  ‘Maybe – maybe. But this brings me to something I would say to you, William. If anything should befall me I do not want my crown to go to Constance’s boy. For one thing my mother, who is like to live to be a hundred, could not tolerate it. Arthur is a sulky and ill-tempered lad and shows no sign of being the man to rule over England or Normandy, quite apart from my southern lands where they would not take kindly to a Breton lord.’

  William hesitated. He knew England better than Richard, and John’s temper, seemingly, better than his brother. ‘Who then, sire? Prince John?’

  ‘Aye, John. Oh, I know he is foolish and has little idea how to lead men, but if he has you and Hubert Walter beside him –’

  ‘He is not far from thirty years old,’ William broke in, ‘and no green boy to be led. When you were in the Holy Land he listened to no one.’

  ‘So I have heard. He behaved very ill and wanted nothing to slip through his greedy hands. But you will guide him, and he will be a better king for better men about him. You would not have Arthur?’

  ‘God preserve us, no!’ William said hastily. He had never forgotten Constance’s behaviour at Clare. ‘And your mother would be horrified at the thought.’

  Richard’s face softened. ‘If such a woman as she could rule it would be better than any King. Do you know that when I was in prison she signed her letters on my behalf to the Pope, “Eleanor, by the wrath of God, Queen of England”. What a woman!’

  ‘I have always known her greatness, sire. And she will hold your brother in check. I have often wondered what he thought when he looked down from the walls at Windsor to see her riding below. But please God you will reign many years yet.

  ‘Pray then that God may hear you; I doubt if He hears me,’ Richard said cryptically. ‘He denied me Jerusalem. But I am a warrior, I’ll die no other way. Come, let’s go in to supper and I’ll sing you my poem “je nus hons pris” which I wrote to while away my time in that cursed Austrian prison. It is a pretty tune – but I think you have little ear for music, eh, William?’

  ‘None,’ William agreed regretfully, and they went in together to the great hall.

  At the entrance, however, Richard set a hand on his arm, a graver expression on his face. ‘Remember what I have said. If you survive me, William, do I have your word that you will hold by my little brother?’

  ‘You have it, sire, I swear it.’ Yet even as he laid his hand briefly on his sword hilt, William thought of John, of that smiling face, heavier than the usual cast of Plantagenet features, the shifty eyes, the unpredictable temper, the total lack of judgement. But he had given his word.

  Richard made him military commander of all the area about Rouen and he brought Isabel and the children to live in the castle there for he found it hard to be parted from her for long. In the summer of 1199 she gave birth to their sixth child and third daughter, whom he named after his mother’s sister, Sybilla, wife to that Earl Patrick whose slaying had led to his imprisonment at Lusignan all those years ago. He watched over his growing family with pride and was already teaching the two elder boys the skills they would need as fighting men. William was an apt pupil and had an eye at the butts that sent his arrow straight to the mark. Richard, always less strong, was never able to compete with his elder brother, but he was never jealous and had a sweetness of disposition that endeared him to everyone. Under the care of John D’Erliegh he was learning to hold his own at least. Gilbert was inclined to live in a world of his own and to sulk if he did not get his way and William found him a trying child, but his godfather took his stubbornness as a sign of the mettle a warrior should possess.

  ‘Let me have him when he is old enough to be my page,’ Gilbert de Clare said and proposed that William’s second daughter should be betrothed to his own son, another Gilbert. William agreed and the two children enjoyed the feasting though little Isabella had no idea why there should be so much singing and laughing and cups raised to her.

  Shortly afterwards William marched out with a large company of knights to Vaudreuil where there had been a disturbance with some marauding Frenchmen. He settled the matter quickly enough and rolled into his bed to fall heavily asleep. In the small hours, however, he was roused by a knight who had galloped through the darkness to reach him and now shook him violently by the shoulder.

  ‘My lord of Pembroke,’ he cried out and his very tone filled William with a certainty of bad tidings. He shook the sleep out of his eyes and struggled up in bed. ‘The King?’ he asked instinctively and reached out for his hose.

  ‘Aye, my lord. An arrow, shot from the walls of Chaluz. It was only a small wound in the shoulder, not fatal, but –’

  ‘Hold,’ William said. ‘Take your breath, boy, and tell me it all.’ He had known Richard was at Chaluz. Some weeks ago a farmer, ploughing, had turned up a great treasure there, gold and silver, but when the King as overlord demanded it, the lord of Chaluz had lied, saying it was no more than a few old coins which were his property anyway. Furious, Richard marched on the castle. His need for money was pressing as always and such a treasure would augment his chests. Was this need, now, to be his undoing?

  William reached for a costrel of wine that stood on the table beside him and held it out. ‘Drink this and tell me –’ and while the knight spoke he began to fling on his clothes.

  ‘The surgeon took the arrowhead out,’ the knight took a deep pull at the wine, ‘but he made a poor bungling job of it, causing the King much pain, though his grace never made a sound, and now the wound is poisoned. The surgeon has tried everything, but the poison is spreading.’ He paused and then, unable to restrain himself, burst into tears. ‘He says the King is dying – and I wish the arrow had struck me, that I had died for him.’

  William was pulling on his padded gambeson, leather shoes and long tunic, at the same time shouting for d’Erleigh to bring his arms. Could it be that the great warrior, the ‘heart of a lion’ had been felled like a tree with an axe set to it, that Richard who had survived so much was to be the victim of a lone archer? ‘Did he send you to me?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, my lord, but not to come to him – yet. He bids you hurry back to Rouen to secure the city and the royal treasury for his brother John. I am to take your word back to him, but –’ he brushed the tears away, ‘but I fear – his mother is with him and Queen Berengaria and they did not think he would live – perhaps not even until I return.’

  ‘Go at once then,’ William urged him. ‘Give him my promise, if he still lives.’

  With the need for speed essential William took no more than a dozen knights with him and rode at once for the capital of Normandy, but he was scarcely inside the dark streets when a second messenger reached him, his own nephew John with the tidings of Richard’s death.

  In dying the King, ever generous, had pardoned the archer who had shot him – he had in fact applauded him at the time, deeming the wound trifling, the aim expert – but his grief-stricken and enraged followers had the man flayed alive, so that his tortured screams drowned the prayers of the priests over the dead King’s corpse.

  In grief for a man he had admired and respected, William prepared to meet the new King, the new Duke of Normandy. John! he thought. God help us all – and England too!

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  T
he Countesses of Pembroke and Clare sat together and looked somewhat helplessly at the Queen of England who crouched on a window-seat in a most unregal fashion, her face blotched with crying, her reserve broken.

  ‘I didn’t know you cared so deeply for him,’ Isabel said. ‘Avice, don’t weep – you will spoil your complexion.’

  ‘Come.’ Amicia leaned forward to take her sister’s hand. ‘Child, it is not the end of all things.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Avice cried out. ‘How can you? I have been a Queen, crowned, and now because John would have King Philip bound more closely to him, I am to be divorced so that he can marry that bitch of Angouleme.’

  ‘You cannot blame her,’ Isabel said quietly. ‘She is no more than a child, not above thirteen years from what I hear. I am sorry, Avice, but perhaps the Holy Father –’

  ‘He will do what John wants,’ the Queen retorted pettishly, the tears momentarily dried by anger. ‘John did not choose to remember when we were married that we shared a common grandfather, but it suits him now to ask that our marriage should be dissolved on those grounds. I shall be shamed before all the court.’

  ‘You will not be shamed,’ her sister said. ‘You have done nothing to be shamed for and I would think it might be a relief for you. John can’t have been the best of husbands. Gilbert says he boasts openly of his seductions, describes them when his attendants dress him in the morning, and as for that business with the Lord of Alnwick’s wife –’

  ‘Don’t speak of it.’ Avice clapped her hands over her ears. ‘I know – of course I know, but a Queen has to bear these things and there were times –’ she turned her head away and the tears came again.